17 July 2015
Kate Storey’s early career took her from the University of Sussex where she obtained a BSc in Neurobiology, via a PhD with Michael Bate at Cambridge, to post-doctoral research with David Weisblat at the University of California at Berkeley. Returning to the UK and the University of Oxford she continued post-doctoral research with Claudio Stern before establishing her own independent research group. In 2000, she moved her group to the College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.
Kate has been a director of The Company of Biologists since 2007, and takes specific responsibility for the Company’s international workshop series and is an advisor for the Company’s journal Development.
Today Kate’s team in Dundee investigates the molecular mechanisms that control how cells become neural and how neuronal differentiation is regulated. Their major discoveries include the oppositional signaling switch from FGF/Wnt to retinoid signaling that controls onset of differentiation during body axis elongation and a new form of cell sub-division, apical abscission, which promotes differentiation of newborn neurons and mediates their release from the ventricular surface.
Kate’s students and post-docs, like many others, have been supported in various ways by The Company of Biologists – both directly and indirectly – through grants that allow them to attend meetings and workshops and through the sharing of knowledge and discoveries.
“The Company of Biologists is unique. It is run by biologists for biologists. I think it makes a significant difference to the community of biologists in the UK and beyond.”
Kate Storey, FRSE, Director