Speaker biography:

Philip Ingham graduated in Natural Sciences (Genetics) from the University of Cambridge and did research for his DPhil at University of Sussex. This included his discovery and pioneering functional analysis of the trithorax gene, now recognized to encode one of the major epigenetic regulators in all vertebrates including human.

As a post doc at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London he perfected techniques for visualizing spatial patterns of gene expression by in situ hybridisation and used these to perform the first ever analyses of gene expression in mutant animals. This led to the elucidation of the gene regulatory networks underlying the establishment of the antero-posterior body axis of Drosophila, the so-called segmentation hierarchy.

Following appointment as an independent group leader at the ICRF labs in Oxford, he elucidated the entire Hedgehog signal transduction pathway, cloned and characterized the genes encoding Hh receptor Patched and signal transducer Smoothened from Drosophila and cloned and characterised the Sonic hedgehog gene in vertebrates. This discovery was identified in 2004 as one of 24 "Milestones in Development" of the past 100 years by the journal “Nature”.

In 2005, he relocated to Singapore and was Deputy Director of the A*STAR IMCB until 2011. In 2013 he moved to the newly established LKC School of Medicine, at Nanyang Technological University Singapore serving as its first vice-Dean for Research.

He was awarded the Genetics Society of Great Britain Medal in 2005 and the Waddington Medal of the British Society for Developmental Biology in 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002 and is also an elected member of EMBO, a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Research with Impact: Professor Philip Ingham