Stephen West - Biography#

Stephen West is a British citizen, born near Hull, Yorkshire, in 1952. He studied Biochemistry at Newcastle University before moving to the USA to carry out post-doctoral work with Paul Howard-Flanders in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. In 1985, he moved back to the UK to set up a research group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's new Clare Hall Laboratories at South Mimms. He is now a Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Stephen West has been a leader in the fields of genetic recombination and DNA repair for the past three decades. As his work crosses the boundaries between basic research studies of DNA repair and tumourigenesis, he is a frequent Keynote speaker at major international meetings. Steve plays an active role in the organisation of international conferences, and co-organised the biannual EMBO workshop on Genetic Recombination and the Maintenance of Genome Stability (1992-2010). He now organises this meeting with support from ABCAM (2014 & 2016). He also organised the first Annual EMBO Conference (with Hans Clevers in 2009).

Steve's research centres on mechanisms of genetic recombination and DNA strand break repair. In particular, he has defined relationships between defective DNA repair processes and human diseases such as inheritable breast cancer and neurological disorders.

(Source: http://crick.ac.uk/)