Amanda Fisher

Dame Amanda Gay Fisher is a British cell biologist and Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) London Institute of Medical Sciences at the Hammersmith Hospital campus of Imperial College London, where she is also a Professor leading the Institute of Clinical Sciences. She has made contributions to multiple areas of cell biology, including determining the function of several genes in HIV and describing the importance of a gene's location within the cell nucleus. As a postdoctoral researcher, she produced the first functional copies of HIV, providing researchers with access to enough biologically active material to study the function of the virus's genes. She later became interested in epigenetics and nuclear reprogramming, particularly in white blood cells known as lymphocytes and embryonic stem cells. As of 2016 her research focuses on how gene expression patterns are inherited when cells divide, using lymphocytes as a model system. 2Education Fisher was educated at the University of Birmingham where she was awarded a PhD in 1984 for research into antigens expressed during myelopoiesis. During her PhD she was awarded a Lady Tata Memorial Fellowship in 1983 to study gene regulation in the laboratory of Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA. 2Research and career Fisher research has used lymphocytes as a model to analyse how gene expression patterns are transmitted through cell division. Fisher also explored the molecular basis of lineage choice. She studies the transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms that underlie cellular differentiation and experimental reprogramming. Fisher's research activities also include pluripotency and reprogramming, polycomb repressor complexes in stem cells, cohesion function in gene expression and genome organisation with Ikaros family transcription factors (TFs