PI Biography

Professor Heike Laman

Heike Laman is Head of the Department of Pathology and Professor in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, where she leads research on ubiquitin ligases and their diverse cellular signals. https://www.path.cam.ac.uk/.

Her research career began at the University of Miami, where she graduated cum laude and with General Honours in 1990 with a BSc in Microbiology & Immunology and a double minor in Chemistry and Biology. Her studies were distinguished by elections to the academic honour societies, Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Beta Phi. As an undergraduate research assistant with Dr Carleen Collins, she sequenced the entire urease operon in Klebsiella pneumoniae and identified its regulatory elements. This was a tour-de-force of sequencing and analysis in the pre-genomics era. This early success in the lab led her to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University.

At Columbia, she worked with Dr David Shore investigating heterochromatin assembly in yeast, earning her MA, MPhil and PhD degrees. Having been awarded a prestigious Fellowship from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now subsumed into the Francis Crick Institute), she then moved to the UK for postdoctoral positions, where she studied viral cyclins with Prof Nic Jones and cell cycle regulation with Dr Gordon Peters. This work revealed how viruses manipulate cellular control mechanisms – insights that influenced her subsequent research. She continued as a Senior Research Fellow at UCL's Wolfson Institute with Prof Chris Boshoff, supported by funding from the Association for International Cancer Research.

In 2005, Professor Laman was awarded a Research Fellowship to establish her independent research group investigating ubiquitin ligases in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge.  Her laboratory has uncovered how these enzymes create diverse cellular signals beyond protein degradation, affecting protein activity, localization, and interactions. This work spans basic mechanisms to disease applications, including collaborations with industrial partners.

She was elected to the Fellowship of Clare College in 2014 and is Director of Studies (Part IB Biology of Disease; Part II Pathology; Part II Genetics), and is the Graduate Admissions Tutor, and a Trustee of the College.