Dr. M. Madan Babu MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK

M. Madan Babu heads the Regulatory Genomics and Systems Biology group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. His group investigates how regulation is achieved at multiple levels of complexity in cellular systems and how this influences evolution of organisms and their genome. Towards this objective, he primarily... read moreuses computational approaches, such as sequence analysis, structure analysis and evolutionary analysis, and develops novel integrative approaches, that use expression data, comparative genomics analysis, network analysis, genomic variation and phenotype data. More recently, his group also exploits yeast genetics to uncover the molecular origins of cell-to-cell variation in expression level of genes in genetically identical cell populations.

He obtained his undergraduate degree in 2001 from the Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University, India with fellowships from the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He then received an LMB-Cambridge International Fellowship and a Trinity College Research Scholarship to carry out his doctoral research at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge, UK. During this time, he carried out studies on the structure, evolution and dynamics of transcriptional regulatory networks by employing a combination of computational approaches. For this work, he was awarded the Max Perutz Prize for outstanding PhD research in 2004. He subsequently received an NIH International Visiting Fellowship to work at the NCBI, USA where he defined general principles of the organization of biological networks. He returned to the UK to become an independent Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2006, was elected as a Schlumberger Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge in 2007 and was appointed as a Programme Leader in 2010.

Madan Babu is an Executive Editor at Nucleic Acids Research, an Associate Editor at Molecular BioSystems and a member of F1000. He was a Director of Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge (2011-2015), and a member of the HUGO council. He has published over 125 papers, reviews and chapters (h-index: 50) and has received several awards including the Biochemical Society’s Early Career Award (2009), EMBO Young Investigator Award (2010), British Genetics Society’s Balfour Award (2011), Royal Society of Chemistry’s Molecular BioSystems Award (2011), the Biochemical Society’s Colworth Medal (2014), the Lister Prize from the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and the Protein Science Young Investigator Award (2014) from the American Protein Society. Most recently, Madan received the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2015) from the Royal Society and was elected as a member of EMBO (2016)