MEET OUR PLENARY LECTURERS 2023

Wendy Bickmore is Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degree is in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and she then completed a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh. Following a postdoc in human genetics, Wendy started her independent research group as a fellow of the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine. She is fascinated by the three-dimensional organisation of the human genome in cells and how that influences genome function in health and disease. Her current research explores how the noncoding genome regulates gene expression, including how distant enhancers communicate with their target gene promoters. Wendy is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy

Each year at our Annual Conference, we honour George Parker Bidder and Harold Woolhouse with two key Plenary Lectures. These lectures, along with the Cell Biology Plenary Lecture, are given by scientists prominent in their field and are nominated by the committees of their respective sections.

Here we introduce our winners and we hope you can join us in celebrating them at our upcoming SEBCentenary Conference!

Elizabeth L. Brainerd is the Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology at Brown University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1991 studying the functional morphology of fishes with Professor Karel Liem, and then was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for postdoctoral work in biomechanics with Professor Tom McMahon. She was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1994 to 2005 and then Full Professor at Brown University. She has broad research interests in the biomechanics and evolution of movement in vertebrate animals, including work on all major groups of extant vertebrates and feeding, breathing and locomotor behaviours. At Brown she has worked with Professor Stephen Gatesy and other colleagues and students to develop X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), which is a set of methods for visualising and quantifying the movements of 3D bones in 3D space. XROMM has been adopted by many research groups around the world and is yielding new insights into musculoskeletal structure, function and evolution.

Thursday 6th July 2023 13:30 - 14:30

Lisa Ainsworth is the Research Leader of the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit and Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her BS in Biology at University of California, Los Angeles, and her PhD in Crop Sciences from UIUC. Her research addresses crop responses to global atmospheric change and potential solutions to mitigate climate change through agriculture. She has long studied photosynthetic responses of plants to climate change, and her research is broadly integrative, from genetic to agronomic scales. In 2011, she was awarded the President’s Medal from the SEB. In 2019, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agricultural Sciences and was an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Talk Date: Wednesday 5th July 2023

Talk Time: 14:00 - 15:00