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E. Elizabeth Patton is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Professor and Group Leader at the MRC Programme Leader Scientist at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Her research focus is understanding the development and progression of melanoma, cancer of the melanocytes (pigment cells).

Education
Patton received her BSc honours degree from King's College, Dalhousie University, Canada and her PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada.

Career
After her PhD, Patton received a Human Frontier Science Programme Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford. . Presently she is the Group Leader and Personal Chair of Chemical Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.

Research
Elizabeth Patton's research is focused on development, growth, migration and homeostasis of melanocytes. Her group studies the genetic and cellular events in the melanocytes that form moles and develop into invasive cancer. To do this, we use the zebrafish system, which allows both the visualization of developing and migrating melanocytes, as well as their aberrant progression to melanoma.

The zebrafish is a powerful model system to study developmental biology, chemical biology and disease models. Due to the similar genetic, molecular and cancer pathology between humans and fish, our melanoma progression model can be viewed as an important starting point for identifying novel genes, environmental conditions, and therapeutic compounds that affect melanoma progression.

We use genetics and chemical-biology to discover the fundamental processes that contribute to melanocyte development during embryogenesis, and explore how these processes contribute to melanoma development. Our lab at the MRC Human Genetics Unit has close collaborations with the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre, and ultimately we aim to translate our discoveries in zebrafish to the understanding and treatment of human disease. We have two zebrafish facilities at the IGMM, and access to a wide range of transgenic and genetic lines, diverse chemical libraries, and state-of-the-art imaging facilities.