News

This year's Kyoto Prize for Sciences has been awarded to Director of Research at the Gurdon Institute, Professor Azim Surani. The Kyoto Prize is an international award of Japanese origin, given to individuals who have made significant contributions in the fields of science and technology, as well as the arts and philosophy.Professor Surani demonstr…

Earlier this month, PDN based PhD and Gates Cambridge Scholar student Spatika Jayaram was crowned the winner of the FameLab 2025 UK final at this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival.  After winning a nail-biting East of England final, which was held as part of the Cambridge Festival in April 2025, Spatika went on to represent the East of England in …

The Rawlins lab has been awarded an ERC Advanced grant focused on developing the underpinning knowledge for future human lung regeneration: LungDeCode.Some lung diseases are even more deadly than cancer. The aim of the new grant obtained by the Rawlins lab is to understand, or decode, how the human lungs normally control the number and type of cell…

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Raffan who is the 2025 recipient of the Blaine Award. The award is presented to veterinarians who are not client facing (e.g. pathology, clinical laboratory) for contributions to the advancement of small animal science in aspects of non-client-facing sciences, including, but not limited to, laboratory based research, p…

Cardiac arrhythmias pose a serious global health challenge. The commonest sustained arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation (AF), affects 1–2% of the worldwide population. Antiarrhythmic drugs (AADs) remain central to their management. The historic, widely accepted Vaughan Williams (VW) classification based on then available (1975) electrophysiological kno…

Dr Caren Norden has been appointed Darwin Professor of Animal Embryology, joining the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience in the School of Biological Sciences, from April 2026. Her lab will be based at the Gurdon Institute.Dr Caren Norden is a developmental biologist focused on uncovering the mechanisms underlying organ formation…

The annual PDN Symposium is back! Taking place over two half days on 24th and 25th of April 2025, the symposium offers an eclectic range of talks from graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty.PDN Research Symposium | Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience

Congratulations to the Giussani Lab, who were the recipients of two prizes at the recent international annual meeting of the Society for Reproductive Investigation (SRI), held in Charlotte NC, USA, March 25-29, 2025. Skaai Davison, second year PhD Student won the top abstract out of ca. 1000 registrants, and was invited to give a talk at the Presid…

We are happy to confirm that we will be participating in this year’s AIM: PhD programme.AIM: PhD is an application support programme, designed to support PhD applicants with their application for doctoral study at the University of Cambridge. Over the course of six months, participants receive support to prepare their PhD application through one-to…

Scientists have identified previously unknown neural modules in the brain that control movement and adapt during skill learning. Their findings challenge long-held ideas about how the brain organizes movement.A new study from the University of Cambridge, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Kumamoto University, has used advanced opt…

Living Science at PDN – Cambridge festivalSaturday, 22 March, from 1.30-3pmPDN Library, Physiology Building, Downing Site.Come and support the department postdocs when they perform as part of the Cambridge Festival this Saturday.What is it like to work in a lab, to look through microscopes, or at computer screens, all day – and to contemplate the c…

We're delighted that PDN has placed third in the world for the study of Anatomy and Physiology! Congratulations to all members of the PDN community for this achievement.The annual QS World University Rankings includes over 170 universities in the subject of Anatomy and Physiology around the world. This year’s ranking features over 1,500 universitie…

A recent study published in Science highlights the value of pet dogs as a model for understanding obesity in both humans and animals. This work was led by PDN and Institute of Metabolic Science (IMS) academic Dr Eleanor Raffan, along with PhD students Dr Natalie Wallis and Dr Alyce McClellan. Each of the top five genes implicated a genome-wide asso…

A new study reveals novel links between transmembrane protein and stem cell nuclear properties.Most tissues are renewed by stem cells that divide to produce correct cell types in response to environmental cues. A fundamental question is how stem cells themselves perceive their environment and are maintained over time to preserve healthy tissue func…

Congratulations to members of the PDN community, who published a new paper today in Cell Stem Cell, highlighting various findings that are significant for both stem cell and developmental biology.The paper, ‘Ectopic expression of DNMT3L in human trophoblast stem cells restores features of the placental methylome’, demonstrates that ectopic expressi…