About the Speaker:

Matthew Freeman is the Head of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford. His first degree was from Oxford, his PhD from Imperial College, London, and he did a postdoctoral fellowship in Berkeley. He returned to the UK to establish his own group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he became Head of the Division of Cell Biology, before moving to Oxford to lead the Dunn School in 2013.

His group originally worked on developmental genetics in Drosophila, but their long-term focus on cell signalling mechanisms steered them towards the cell biology, genetics and biochemistry of membrane proteins, with a specific focus on the rhomboid-like superfamily of proteases and pseudoproteases, which they discovered. Although primarily driven by fundamental discovery science, their work has the goal of revealing principles relevant to human disease. Recently, this has included insights into inflammation, immunity and cancer.

Matthew Freeman is a past Chair of the British Society of Developmental Biology, and the Company of Biologists. He currently Chairs EMBO Council. He has a long-standing interest in science policy and served for many years on the executive committee of CaSE (formerly Save British Science). Among other prizes, he has been awarded the EMBO Gold Medal (2001), the Hooke Medal of the British Society for Cell Biology (2003), and the Novartis Prize and Medal (2015). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mapping-the-unknome-may-reveal-critical-genes-scientists-have-ignored/