Kathryn Lilley - Biography#

Kathryn Lilley is a world leading biochemist. She was educated at the University of Sheffield, UK receiving a BSc (1985) and PhD (1990) in Biochemistry.

She took the unusual step of becoming a core facility manager rather than further doctoral training at both the universities of Cambridge and Leicester. In 2004, she moved onto an academic scale at the University of Cambridge and was quickly promoted to Associate Professor (Reader) and then full professor within 8 years.

She heads a large research group who focuss on the development of technologies that allow interrogation of the spatial distributions of the proteome and its reorganisation upon cellular perturbation. Importantly, her methods are underpinned by robust open source informatics pipelines enabling their end to end use by the research community. She collaborates widely, both nationally and internationally to ensure that her methods are efficiently and broadly applied. Furthermore, she recently embarked on a change of direction within her research programme, developing methods to investigate the subcellular spatial transcriptome and its interaction with the proteome. This departure has resulted quickly in new empowering technology and a growing interest in her work from the field of RNA biology.

She receives considerable funding from the Pharmaceutical Industry.

With other leaders in her field, she publishes thought pieces and 'white papers' as requested by top journals. Her standing within the fields of proteomics and cell biology is exemplified by the large number of plenary and keynote talks she is invited to give world wide.

Kathryn has received several international awards and was elected as a member of EMBO in 2020.