User:YosDav/Christian Speck draft-revised

Christian Speck (born 3 October 1970) is a German biochemist, biotechnologist and interdisciplinary research scientist in DNA replication. He is Full Professor and Chair of Genome Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and head of the DNA Replication Group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at the Hammersmith Campus of Imperial College London. Speck’s research group studies the mechanisms in genome stability and epigenetics, with a particular interest in disease associated with these processes and the development of novel DNA replication inhibitors for therapeutic purposes.

Education, training and career
Speck earned his Diplom-Ingenieur degree in Biotechnology in 1995 from Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin and his Diplom (1997) and PhD (2000) degrees in Biochemistry from Freie Universität Berlin. For his PhD, he studied bacterial gene regulation and DNA replication   as a Max Planck Society PhD Fellow in the laboratory of Walter Messer at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In 2001, Speck was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to work on the reconstitution and characterisation of the ORC-Cdc6-origin DNA complex in Saccharomyces cerevisiae with Bruce Stillman’s group, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Since 2006, Speck has led the DNA Replication Group, initially at the now defunct Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinical Sciences Centre, and, since 2013, at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial College London. He was appointed lecturer in 2013, reader in 2015, and Full Professor and Chair of Genome Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in 2016. In 2015, Speck received a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). He has served on numerous scientific evaluation panels (ANR, DAAD, Horizon 2020) and editorial boards and as the chair of the Athena SWAN opportunities committee, supporting gender equality in research. He is a founding member of the London consortium for cryo-EM (LonCEM) and established the cryo-EM facility at the Hammersmith Campus of Imperial College London.

Research
Speck’s group is focussed on discovering new mechanisms in initiation of DNA replication and understanding the function of replication factors in hetero-chromatin formation. The lab is using an integrative approach involving biochemical, genetic, genomic, structural, and molecular methods to obtain a holistic understanding of the underlying biological processes, uncover novel mechanisms and regulatory principles, and develop specific therapeutic inhibitors for disease associated with these processes.

The group has reconstituted the loading of the eukaryotic replicative helicase onto DNA — an essential step in DNA replication — and has used this system to address the mechanism and regulation of two key events: 1) the stepwise loading of the eukaryotic DNA helicase onto DNA      , and 2) the kinase-dependent activation of the helicase. In more recent years, Speck has developed an interest in investigating the role of helicase loading factors in epigenetic memory, which has important implications for human disease and ageing.