Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Resources and Operations, University of Cambridge

Head, School of the Biological Sciences, University of Cambridge

Professor Philpott started hew new role in October 2024, and takes over from current Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor David Cardwell.

A developmental biologist with a long-standing interest in how cells within developing embryos decide which fate to adopt, as well as how they decide whether to proliferate or arrest cell division and adopt a mature functional state, Professor Philpott is also interested in how control of these processes is subverted in cancer cells.

She undertook her first Degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, studying at Selwyn College, and followed this with a PhD in chromatin biology, also at Cambridge. She then moved to Boston in the US, to undertake two post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School. She moved back to Cambridge in 1998 to start her own lab in the Department of Oncology, and is a Fellow of Clare College.

Her laboratory in the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute continues to use multiple experimental systems, and in particular Xenopus frog eggs and embryos, to understand fundamental mechanisms controlling cell fate and differentiation during embryogenesis, and how these are subverted to drive the aberrant behaviour of cancer cells. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2020, and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2022.