Heike Laman was awarded her PhD from Columbia University in 1997 having studied transcriptional regulation in yeast with David Shore. She was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship to move to London to work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now part of the Francis Crick Institute, with Nic Jones and Gordon Peters studying cell cycle regulation. She then became a Senior Research Fellow at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research/UCL, working with Chris Boshoff on cellular factors promoting KSHV-driven cancers.  She was awarded an Early Career Fellowship to start her independent research group in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge in 2005, where she is now the Head of Department. She is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and a Fellow at Clare College. 

Her research focuses on the study of ubiquitin signalling, which is fundamentally important for normal cellular functions like the regulation of the cell cycle or adaptive responses to environmental stresses or infections. The mission of her lab is to understand and harness ubiquitin signalling to develop novel treatments for diseases, like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, sterility and anaemia.

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