Nicholas Hastie - Biography#

Professor Nick Hastie is Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine in Edinburgh. Nick Hastie was born in North Wales, where he attended Colwyn Bay Grammar School. He went on to receive an honours degree in Medical Microbiology at Liverpool University. Following that, he carried out his PhD work on Influenza Replication at Cambridge University. Since then, he has worked in many areas including gene expression, genome organisation (including telomeres) and protein evolution. He has had a long-term interest in human developmental genetics, concentrating on the childhood kidney cancer, Wilms’ tumour. Over the past few years Professor Hastie has also become heavily engaged in a major population genetics project to identify genetic risk factors for common disease. Nick Hastie was an International Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; he chaired the General Motors Cancer MOT Awards.
Committee and sat on the General Motors Assembly. He is Chairperson of a number of Scientific Advisory Boards, including (until 2010) that for the Sanger Institute and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. He was European Editor of Genes & Development for a decade and currently sits on the Advisory Boards of Genes & Development and PLoS Biology. Professor Hastie is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Member of EMBO and was awarded a CBE for Services to Science in 2006. He was awarded the Medal of the Genetics Society of the UK in 2008. In his spare time Nick likes to do body combat, sing, listen to music, read, garden and watch movies and rubbish on television.