As an undergraduate in Oxford Austin Smith became captivated by pluripotency. He pursued this interest through PhD studies in Edinburgh and postdoctoral research back in Oxford. He returned to Edinburgh as a Group Leader in 1990 and from 1996 was Director of the Centre for Genome Research, later the Institute for Stem Cell Research. In 2006 he moved to Cambridge where he was the founding Director of the Stem Cell Institute. Professor Smith is a Medical Research Council Professor, an EMBO Member, and a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and of London. In 2010 he was awarded the Louis Jeantet Prize and in 2016 he received the ISSCR McEwen award for Innovation.
Key Publications
Group Members
Kalkan T, Olova N, Roode M, Mulas C, Lee HJ, Nett I, Marks H, Walker R, Stunnenberg HG, Lilley KS, Nichols J, Reik W, Bertone P, Smith A. Tracking the embryonic stem cell transition from ground state pluripotency. Development 2017 doi:10.1242/ dev.142711 PMID: 28174249
Smith A. (2017) Formative pluripotency: the executive phase in a developmental continuum. Development 2017 144: 365-373; PMID: 28143843
Nicholas Bredenkamp (Post-doc Researcher) James Clarke (Laboratory Manager) Rosalind Drumond (Research Assistant) Ge Guo (Post-doc Researcher) Tuzer Kalkan (Post-doc Researcher) Masaki Kinoshita (Post-doc Researcher) Meng Amy Li (Henry Wellcome Fellow) Sam Myers (PhD Student) Mariya Rostovskaya (Post-doc Researcher)
Guo G, von Meyenn F, Santos F, Chen Y, Reik W, Bertone P, Smith A, Nichols J. (2016) Naive Pluripotent Stem Cells Derived Directly from Isolated Cells of the Human Inner Cell Mass. Stem Cell Reports. 2016 Apr 12;6(4):437-46 PMCID: PMC4834040 Leeb M, Dietmann S, Paramor M, Niwa H, Smith A. (2014) Genetic exploration of the exit from selfrenewal using haploid embryonic stem cells. Cell Stem Cell. 2014 Mar 6;14(3):385-93 PMCID: PMC3995090 Smith Group
Takashima Y, Guo G, Loos R, Nichols J, Ficz G, Krueger F, Oxley D, Santos F, Clarke J, Mansfield W, Reik W, Bertone P, Smith A. (2014) Resetting Transcription Factor Control Circuitry toward Ground -State Pluripotency in Human. Cell 158 (6), 12541269. PMCID: PMC4162745
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