PI Biography

Professor Heike Laman

Heike Laman is the Head of the Department of Pathology and a Professor in Cellular and Molecular Biology. https://www.path.cam.ac.uk/. She was awarded her BSc. from the University of Miami in 1990, majoring in Microbiology & Immunology with a double minor in Chemistry and Biology. She graduated cum laude, with General Honors, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Beta Phi.

Prior to starting her PhD studies, she worked as a research assistant with Dr Carleen Collins.  Here she sequenced the entire urease operon in Klebsiella pneumoniae and discovered the promoter elements controlling its expression. 

She earned her MA, MPhil and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in 1992, 1994, and 1997, respectively. Her graduate studies were supervised by Dr David Shore at Columbia University in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, researching heterochromatin assembly in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. 

Prof Laman emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1997 to undertake post-doctoral research. She was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London to work on virally-encoded cyclins with Prof Nic Jones from 1997-1999, and in the Cell Cycle Regulation laboratory of Dr Gordon Peters, from 1999-2001. She was awarded a project grant by the Association for International Cancer Research working as a Senior Research Fellow in the Viral Oncology laboratory of Prof Chris Boshoff at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London from 2001-2005.

In 2005, Professor Laman was awarded her independent Research Fellowship to join the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge.  She was elected to the Fellowship of Clare College in 2014 and is Director of Studies in Pathology and Genetics, Graduate Admissions Tutor, and Trustee of the College.