User:CRUKSciMedHJ/Laura Machesky

= Laura Machesky = Professor Laura Machesky FRSE FMEDSci is an American cancer research scientist currently based in Glasgow. Machesky is Deputy Director of the Institute of Cancer Sciences at the University of Glasgow, and a Senior Research Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute.

Career
Originally from Michigan, Machesky moved to Scotland in 2007 to take up post as a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Cell Biology at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow. Before this she was an MRC Career Development Fellow, MRC Senior Research Fellow & Professor of Cell Biology at the School of Biosciences University of Birmingham since 1999.

Research Interests
Machesky's research group specialises in cancer cell migration, invasion and metastasis. She discovered the 7-subunit Arp2/3 complex and showed that this was a major regulator of actin dynamics and cell migration. According to the Academy of Medical Sciences, this work "changed the way the field understood fundamental principles of signalling to actin dynamics and impacted on biomedical problems such as host-pathogen interactions, endocytic trafficking, phagocytosis and cancer cell invasion".

Since joining the Beatson Institute, her team has discovered how Rho GTPases control developmental migration of melanocytic cells. This research has improved our understanding of how these processes go wrong in melanoma metastasis.

Awards and Honours
Machesky was elected as a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2012, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2014 , and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016.