Anne Willis, OBE, PhD profile page

Anne Willis is director of the MRC Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge. She obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of London while working in the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories (now CRUK) on DNA repair with Dr. Tomas Lindahl, before moving to Cambridge initially for a Junior Research Fellowship to work with Professor Richard Perham in the Department of Biochemistry.
Anne’s first independent position was as Lecturer in the biochemistry department at the University of Leicester, where she progressed to Professor. In 2004, she was appointed Director of Cancer Research Nottingham and Chair of Cancer Cell Biology, where she was based in the School of Pharmacy, before becoming Director of the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2010.
Her research is directed towards understanding the role of post-transcriptional control in response to toxic injury with a focus on RNA-binding proteins, regulatory RNA motifs and tRNAs. Through mechanistic research, the unit is developing predictive adverse outcome models that can be shared with industrial partners. In particular, they are working to understand the “off-target” effects of new modalities such as therapeutic RNAs.