Austin Smith | AIChE

Austin Smith

Medical Research Council Professor
University of Cambridge

I graduated from the University of Oxford in 1982 and pursued PhD research in Edinburgh. After a post-doctoral period back in Oxford, I returned to Edinburgh in 1990 as a Group Leader at the Centre for Genome Research. I became Centre Director in 1995 and brought together embryonic and adult stem cell biologists to form the Institute for Stem Cell Research. I was appointed to a Medical Research Council Professorship in 2003. In 2006 I relocated to Cambridge and founded the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, which I directed until 2016. In 2019 I took up the position of Director of the Living Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.

My research interest is stem cell biology and in particular pluripotent stem cells that harbour the capacity to generate all cell types of the mammalian organism. Our research aims to derive universal principles underlying the establishment and progression of pluripotency in diverse mammalian embryos. We seek to expose network properties that enable long-term self-renewal in vitro of transient in vivo cell states, and to recapitulate in culture the developmental trajectory from an emergent naïve population into lineage specified progenitors. We use approaches ranging from computational modelling to in vivo chimaera studies.

I am a member of EMBO and the Academia Europaea. I was awarded the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2010, and received the International Society for Stem Cell Research Innovation Award in 2016.

Home page:

https://www.exeter.ac.uk/livingsystems/team/profile/index.php?web_id=Aus...

Recent publications

Bredenkamp, N., J. Yang, J. Clarke, G. G. Stirparo, F. von Meyenn, D., .… Smith, A.* and Guo, G.* (2019). Wnt Inhibition Facilitates RNA-Mediated Reprogramming of Human Somatic Cells to Naive Pluripotency. Stem Cell Reports, 13, doi: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2019.10.009 

Kalkan, T., Bornelöv, S., Mulas, C., Diamanti, E., Lohoff, T., Ralser, M., Middelkamp, S., Lombard, P., Nichols, J. and Smith, A. (2019). Complementary Activity of ETV5, RBPJ, and TCF3 Drives Formative Transition from Naive Pluripotency. Cell Stem Cell, 24, 785-801.e7 doi: 10.1016/j.stem.2019.03.017

Rostovskaya, M., Stirparo, G. G. and Smith, A. (2019). Capacitation of human naïve pluripotent stem cells for multi-lineage differentiation. Development 146, doi: 10.1242/dev.172916

Guo, G., von Meyenn, F., Santos, F., Chen, Y., Reik, W., Bertone, P., Smith A.* and Nichols, J. (2016). Naive Pluripotent Stem Cells Derived Directly from Isolated Cells of the Human Inner Cell Mass. Stem Cell Reports, 6, 437-446. doi: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2016.02.005

Takashima, Y., Guo, G., Loos, R., Nichols, J., Ficz, G., Krueger, F., . . . Smith, A. (2015). Resetting Transcription Factor Control Circuitry toward Ground-State Pluripotency in Human. Cell, 162, 452-453. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2015.06.052