Staff and students are invited to come hear Prof Ottoline Leyser talk about why women are under-represented in science and about her own experiences of raising a family and pursuing a successful academic career. Ottoline believes that while it is certainly true that academic careers are competitive, the negativity in the discussion about academic careers in science and the ability of women to pursue them is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Biography:-
The work that Prof Ottoline Leyser conducted during her PhD involved the analysis of meristem mutants of Arabidopsis, under the supervision of Ian Furner in the Genetics Department at Cambridge University. She then spent three years at Indiana University working on auxin signalling in the lab of Mark Estelle, eventfully punctuated by the birth of her two children. After a brief spell back in Cambridge, she moved to the University of York where she established a research group combining her interests in meristems and hormone signalling to analyse the role of auxin and other hormones in regulating shoot branching plasticity. In January 2011 she became Associate Director of the new Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University, which focuses on plant developmental biology and its computational modelling.
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