Stephen Jackson (scientist)

Stephen Jackson
Born	Stephen Philip Jackson (1962-07-17) 17 July 1962 Nottingham, England
Nationality	British
Fields	Cancer DNA repair Cell biology Molecular biology
Institutions	Gurdon Institute University of Cambridge University of California, Berkeley University of Edinburgh
Alma mater	University of Leeds (BSc) Imperial College London (PhD) University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Thesis	Cloning and characterisation of the RNA8 gene of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (1987)
Doctoral advisor	Jean Beggs
Known for	Understanding cellular responses to DNA damage and their relevance to cancer
Notable awards	EMBO member (1997) Fellow of the Royal Society (2008) FMedSci (2001) Buchanan Medal (2011) King Faisal International Prize (2016) Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine (2016)
Website www.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/research/jackson www2.gurdon.cam.ac.uk/~jacksonlab/

Stephen Philip Jackson, FRS, FMedSci, (born 17 July 1962) is the Frederick James Quick Professor of Biology and a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He is a Senior Group Leader and Head of Cancer Research UK Laboratories at the Gurdon Institute, and an Associate Faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.^[1] He is also part-time Chief Scientific Officer for MISSION Therapeutics Ltd.^[2]

Education

Professor Jackson was educated at the University of Leeds, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry in 1983.^[3] He then carried out his PhD research working with Jean Beggs on yeast RNA splicing at Imperial College London and Edinburgh University, earning his PhD in 1987.^[4]

Research

Following his PhD, Jackson carried out postdoctoral research with Robert Tjian at the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed an interest in the regulation of transcription. He returned to the UK in 1991 as a Junior Group Leader at the then Wellcome-CRC Institute, now the Gurdon Institute.

In 1997 Jackson founded KuDOS Pharmaceuticals with the aim of translating knowledge of DNA damage response pathways into new treatments for cancer. KuDOS developed into a fully integrated drug-discovery and drug-development company and was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2005.^[5]

In 2011 Jackson founded MISSION Therapeutics^[2][6] a firm to develop drugs to improve the management of life-threatening diseases, particularly cancer.

Honours and Awards

Jackson has received various prizes, including the Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award (2008),^[7] the BBSRC Innovator of the Year Award (2009),^[8] the Royal Society Buchanan Medal (2011),^[9] the latter in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to understanding DNA repair and DNA damage response signalling pathways", and the Gagna A. & Ch. Van Heck Prize ^[10] (2015) for "his cardinal contributions related to cellular events that detect, signal the presence of and repair DNA damages". Jackson is the co-winner of the King Faisal International Prize for Science 2016, in recognition of his "outstanding contribution to defining the link between the basic mechanism of genomic DNA instability and its relationship to cancer. Specifically, he unraveled the salient components of the pathway involved in DNA repair. He is also credited with an innovative approach to bring his findings into tangible therapeutic products to treat cancer".^[11] He was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 1997, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001^[12] and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008.^[13] In 2016 Jackson won the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Medicine^[14] for his "fundamental research into DNA repair in human cells and for the successful application of knowledge of that process in the development of new cancer drugs".^[15]

References