Professor Michael Wakelam received a PhD in Biochemistry from Birmingham
University in 1980. After post doctoral work at the University of Konstanz in
Germany and as a Beit Memorial Research Fellow at Imperial College London he
was appointed to a Lectureship in Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow in
1985. He was recruited by the University of Birmingham to a Chair in Molecular
Pharmacology in the Department of Cancer Sciences in 1993 and became the
Director and Chief Executive of the Babraham Institute in 2007 and Honorary
Professor of Lipid Signalling at Cambridge University. He was previously a
member of MRC Council and Chair of its Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board.
Since 2012 he has been a visiting Professor at KCL.
Michael’s work has focused upon the roles and regulation of lipid signaling, most
recently the phospholipase D and PI-3-kinase pathways. He was one of the
earliest adopters of mass spectrometry as an analytical lipidomics platform and
has developed novel methodologies permitting quantitative analysis of lipid
signaling in studying normal cells, inflammation and overgrowth syndromes
including cancer.