Christine Holt
| Christine Holt | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Christine Elizabeth Holt 28 August 1954 |
| Alma mater | BSc in biological sciences, University of Sussex; PhD in zoology, King's College, London University |
| Spouse(s) | W.A. Harris |
| Awards | Elected Member of EMBO (2005), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2007), Fellow of the Royal Society (2009); Remedios Caro Almela Prize in Developmental Neurobiology (2011); Champalimaud Foundation Vision Award (2016). |
| Website | http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/staff/holt/index.shtml |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience |
| Institutions | Professor of Developmental Neuroscience, University of Cambridge |
Christine Elizabeth Holt FRS, FMedSci (born 28 August 1954) is a British developmental neuroscientist.
She has been Professor of Developmental Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, since 2003 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, since 1997.
In 2009, she was part of an international team that received a "Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) grant to develop molecular probes that will help researchers better understand the "cellular GPS" system that guides neurons to create a properly wired nervous system."
In 1977, Christine Holt received a Bachelor of Science (Honors) in biological sciences at the University of Sussex. She then completed her Ph.D. in zoology with John Scholes as her mentor at King’s College London in 1982 Her first publication “Cell movements in Xenopus eye development” in Nature magazine in 1980 highlighted the movements of the cells during development based on the eye polarity. From 1982 to 1986, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Physiology Department at Oxford University and the Biology department of University of California San Diego (UCSD). Her mentors were W.A. Harris and Colin Blakemore.
In 1986, while she was an assistant research biologist and lecturer at University at California at San Diego, she received the McKnight Scholar Award, which granted her $30,000 annually for 3 years. She was then studying the development of frog’s visual system in early embryonic period. She expressed interest in “the basic mechanisms that govern how the vertebrate brain becomes wired up in the highly specific and complex way that it does”. She was also granted an Alexander von Humboldt award, which allowed her to perform research in Germany in 1987.
She joined the faculty at UCSD in 1989, and her main research focus was early brain development. She was particularly interested in the visual system and the mechanism in which axons from retina grow to specific brain cells. During this period, she performed experiments to understand the role of adhesion molecules in axon guidance by assessing the loss of N-cadherin and integrins, two of the three types of adhesion molecules, on embryonic brain. In 1991, she was awarded $200,000 as Pew Scholar to fund her research over four years.
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