Prof. Sir Philip Cohen University of Dundee, UK

Philip Cohen received his BSc (1966) and PhD (1969) from University College London and then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA with Edmond Fischer (the 1992 Nobel Laureate for Medicine or Physiology). In 1971 he returned to the UK to become a... read moreFaculty member at the University of Dundee, Scotland where he has worked ever since. Philip has been a Royal Society Research Professor since 1984, Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit since its inception in 1990, and is the Honorary President of the British Biochemical Society from 2006-2008.
For the past 40 years, Philip's research has been devoted to studying the role of protein phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease, a process that controls almost all aspects of cell life. His contributions to this area include working out over a 25 year period how insulin stimulates the synthesis of glycogen in muscle. Currently his laboratory is working on the signaling pathways that regulate the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and interferons during bacterial and viral infection, research that is aimed at understanding how the uncontrolled production of these substances causes chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma and septic shock.