Personal Chair: Kenneth Sawin

Kenneth Sawin has been made a Personal Chair in Cell Biology.

While studying for a BA in Physics and Philosophy at Yale University, Professor Sawin became interested in cell biology in general, and the cytoskeleton - the components that make up the internal structure of cells - in particular.

Changing fields after graduation, Sawin obtained his PhD in Cell Biology at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1993.

His PhD supervisor was Professor Tim Mitchison, whose uncle, the late J Murdoch Mitchison, was Professor of Zoology at the University of Edinburgh until retirement in 1988.

Professor Sawin then moved to London as a postdoctoral fellow with Sir Paul Nurse, whose Nobel Prize-winning (2001) work on the cell cycle was initiated while working at the University of Edinburgh in Murdoch Mitchison’s laboratory in the 1970s.

Professor Sawin “completed the Edinburgh circle” in 1999 when he started his own independent group at the University’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, as a Senior Research Fellow.

Using the tools of genetics, biochemistry and microscopy, Sawin continues to investigate the questions that originally drew him to biology, such as how cells are “built from the inside”.