Steve West elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Steve West .

Steve West 

The Francis Crick Institute group leader, Steve West, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as an International Honorary Member.

It is a great honour to be recognised in this way and to be elected to the Academy.
Steve West

The prestigious academy, founded in 1780, is made up of members who are working to advance knowledge to help solve the problems of society. It is an honourary society and an independent research centre.

Steve West, group leader of the DNA Recombination and Repair Laboratory, is among more than 250 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts elected to the academy in 2021.

Steve says, “It is a great honour to be recognised in this way and to be elected to the Academy.” 

Steve has worked at the Crick since it formed in 2015, previously being based at the Cancer Research UK Clare Hall Laboratories. His work studies a type of DNA repair, called homologous recombination, that rejoins broken chromosomes. People who inherit faults in the genes involved in this repair process have an increased risk of cancer or other conditions. 

By understanding how these genes work and seeing what happens when they go wrong, his lab aims to learn about the fundamental processes that keep cells healthy and identify new ways to prevent or treat cancer and other diseases.

Steve joins the company of Crick director Paul Nurse and researchers Karen Vousden and Peter Ratcliffe who have previously been elected to the academy. While Robin Lovell-Badge was awarded the academy’s Amory Prize, for research in reproductive biology, in 1996. 

Other notable international members have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier and Nelson Mandela. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Steve will be inducted into the Academy in Boston in spring 2022.


 

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