The Lister Prize, awarded by the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine, is one of the most prestigious awards for biomedical researchers in the early years of establishing their research groups. Each Fellow receives a lump sum of £300,000 in flexible funding over five years, giving Fellows the freedom to take their science in bold new directions. Prize recipients also join a community of current and former Lister Fellows and benefit from mentorship at the Lister’s Annual Fellows Meeting.
Anjali Hinch’s group studies the mechanisms of meiosis and germline mutagenesis, with a focus on their impacts on human health. A recipient of a Wellcome Trust Henry Dale Fellowship and a Wellcome-Beit Fellow, she started her career in finance, before completing a PhD at Oxford in computational genomics. She initially established her group at the Oxford Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, before moving to the Dunn School in 2024.
Girish Mali’s group works on the assembly mechanisms of ciliary dynein motors, supported by an MRC Career Development Award and a Springboard Award (Academy of Medical Sciences and Wellcome). He completed a PhD at the MRC Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh and a postdoc at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, starting his independent career as a lecturer at the University of Bristol. He moved his group to the Dunn School in 2023. The Lister Research Prize will allow Girish to launch new lines of investigation in his lab, in collaboration with the James and Lillian Martin Centre for Stem Cell Research, headed by Dr Sally Cowley, to better model and understand Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD). PCD is a rare, incurable and potentially fatal human disease characterised by chronic lung infections due to defective dynein-driven ciliary motion. An overarching goal of Girish’s research is to investigate the molecular causes of faulty cilia and find new therapeutics to repair them in PCD.
Read the full story on the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology website