About
Tim’s research interests are focused on understanding the molecular changes that occur as cancers develop and evade destruction by our immune system. His goal is to apply these findings to enable earlier diagnosis and more effective therapy.
Tim’s group has made several important contributions, including the discovery that APOBEC3 enzymes (part of our innate immune response to viral infection) cause oncogenic driver mutations, thus directly contributing to cancer development. He has recently made further key contributions to this field, identifying a new mechanism for APOBEC3A regulation in squamous epithelia and developing a transgenic model in which the solitary mouse Apobec3 gene has been replaced with the entire 7-gene human APOBEC3 locus.
Tim's group also helped to clarify the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in head and neck cancer causation and prognosis and developed a computational tool (MethylCIBERSORT), to allow estimation of the different cell types present in the tumour microenvironment using DNA methylation data from bulk tumour samples.
Continuing his interests in the pathogenesis of HPV-associated cancer, Tim recently led a collaborative team from centres in the UK, Austria and Norway to conduct the largest multi-omics analysis of cervical cancer to-date, identifying two disease subgroups with differing prognosis. Work to interrogate the differences between these tumour subgroups at the single cell resolution continues in his lab.
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Research
Current research
Regulation and function of the APOBEC3 enzymes in normal and cancer cells.
Head and neck cancer genomics (member of the head and neck cancer Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership for the 100,000 genomes project).
Identification of therapeutic targets for HPV-associated malignancies.
Interrogating the tumour immune microenvironment of cervical squamous cell carcinoma and its relationship to disease progression.
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Current research
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Supervision
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Teaching
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Biography
Tim is a Professor in the School of Cancer Sciences and member of the Institute for Life Sciences. He obtained his BSc in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Durham in 2001, followed by a PhD at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, UCL with Prof Ivan Gout, studying the ribosomal S6 kinases (enzymes involved in the control of cell growth in response to nutrient and growth factor signals). In 2005 Tim took up a postdoctoral position with Prof Webster Cavenee and Prof Frank Furnari at the University of California San Diego LICR branch, where he continued to work on growth factor signalling in cancer, uncovering a molecular mechanism that renders brain tumour cells resistant to drugs targeting the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor. In 2011 Tim moved back to UCL, joining Prof Chris Boshoff’s Cancer Research UK Viral Oncology Lab as a senior research associate before gaining funding from Rosetrees Trust to establish his independent research, taking up a faculty position in the School of Biosciences as the University of Kent in April 2017, where he worked first as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer before moving to Southampton as Associate Professor in Cancer Biology in January 2022. He was promoted to Professor in 2024.
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Prizes
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