Frances Ashcroft

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Dame Frances Ashcroft
Born Frances Mary Ashcroft
(1952-02-15) 15 February 1952 (age 72)[1]
Nationality British
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Alma mater University of Cambridge
Thesis Calcium electrogenesis in insect muscle (1978)
Notable awards <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Website
www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/group-leaders/frances-ashcroft

Dame Frances Mary Ashcroft, DBE, FRS, FMedSci, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (born 1952) is a British geneticist and ion channel physiologist. She is Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Research Professor at the University Laboratory of Physiology at the University of Oxford. She is a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and is a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function. Her research group has an international reputation for work on insulin secretion, type II diabetes and neonatal diabetes.[3][4] Her work with Professor Andrew Hattersley has helped enable children born with diabetes to switch from insulin injections to tablet therapy.[5][6]

Education

After attending Talbot Heath School Ashcroft gained a degree in Natural Sciences, and then a PhD in zoology from Cambridge in 1978.[7][8] Ashcroft then did post-doctoral research at the University of Leicester and the University of California at Los Angeles.[9]

Career

Ashcroft is a Director of OXION: Ion Channels and Disease Initiative, a research and training programme on integative ion channel research, funded by the Wellcome Trust.[10]

Research

Ashcroft's research focuses on ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP)channels and their role in insulin secretion. Ashcroft is working towards explaining how a rise in the blood glucose concentration stimulates the release of insulin from the pancreatic beta-cells, what goes wrong with this process in type 2 diabetes, and how drugs used to treat this condition exert their beneficial effects.[11] Ashcroft has authored a few science and popular science books based on ion channel physiology:

  • Ion Channels and Disease: Channelopathies on channelopathic diseases [12]
  • Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival [13]
  • The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body[14]

Honours and awards

Ashcroft was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.[15] In 2007 Ashcroft was awarded the Walter B. Cannon Award, the highest honour bestowed by the American Physiological Society.[16] She was one of five 2012 winners of the L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.[17]

Ashcroft was awarded an honorary degrees of Doctor of the University from the Open University in 2003 and Doctor of Science from the University of Leicester on 13 July 2007.[8]

Ashcroft delivered the Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society in 2013.[18]

In the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) 'for services to Medical Science and the Public Understanding of Science'.[19]

Personal life

Ashcroft appeared (as a diner) on MasterChef during the 2011 series, along with several other Fellows of the Royal Society.

References

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  6. Frances Ashcroft talks to ReAgent about career advice for scientists
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  12. 1999, Academic Press, ISBN 0120653109
  13. 2000, Harper Collins, ISBN 0141046538
  14. 2012, W. W. Norton and Company, ISBN 0006551254
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  17. Ashcroft receives L'oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science
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  19. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 61256. p. B8. 13 June 2015. Retrieved 12 June 2015.