SCILLS - The Scottish Institute for Cell Signalling

SCILLS is dedicated to the study of how biological processes are controlled and how they become deregulated in disease. The Protein Ubiquitination Unit is the Institute’s first research Division. Its major aims are to advance understanding of the role of protein ubiquitination and related modifications in cell regulation and human disease, to facilitate the development of drugs to treat diseases caused by abnormalities in this process, to generate reagents and improve technologies on which more rapid progress in this area depends, and to train the next generation of scientists who will advance the subject.

Background
Research

Sir Philip Cohen

E: p.cohen@dundee.ac.uk

T: 44 1382 384238

F: 44 1382 223778

Michelle Mulligan
PA to Sir Philip Cohen

E: m.z.mulligan@dundee.ac.uk

T: 44 1382 384238

F: 44 1382 223778

Sir Philip Cohen FRS, FRSE

Background

Philip Cohen received his B.Sc (1966) and Ph.D (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 Faculty 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 1990 and became the founding Director of the SCottish Institute for ceLL Signalling (SCILLS) in 2008. Philip is also the Co-Director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT) the UK’s largest collaboration between a basic research institution and the pharmaceutical industry. It is widely regarded as a model for how industry and academia should interact, for which it received a Queen’s Anniversary Award for Higher Educaton in 2006.

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 topic include working out the signaling pathway downstream of PI 3-kinase by which insulin stimulates glycogen synthesis in muscle, the classification and characterization of serine/threonine-specific protein phosphatases and the elucidation of MAP kinase cascades. Currently his laboratory is trying to unravel the signaling pathways in the innate immune system that control the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and interferons during bacterial and viral infection, and in which the interplay between protein ubiquitylation and protein phosphorylation plays a critical role. According to Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, Philip Cohen was the world’s second most cited scientist in the field of biology and biochemistry from 1992-2003.