Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal Winner 2025
Helen Weavers
Helen Weavers is a group leader in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Bristol. Helen completed her PhD with Helen Skaer, in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, on the morphogenesis of the Drosophila renal system. During her later post-doctoral research with Paul Martin and Will Wood at the University of Bristol, she began to work on the mechanisms underlying cellular responses to damage. Integrating live imaging with genetics and computational approaches, Helen uncovered multiple aspects of immune cell biology, including the generation of immune cell ‘memory’ (Weavers et al., 2016a) and the signalling underlying immune cell recruitment to injury (Weavers et al., 2016b).
In 2018, Helen was awarded a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship to establish her independent research group. Her interdisciplinary team focuses on the molecular mechanisms enabling cells and tissues to resist and recover from insult, with the aim of developing novel therapies for regenerative medicine. Her group uses a wide range of cutting-edge approaches, integrating in vivo live imaging, molecular cell biology, genetics and ‘omics with computational modelling and genetic epidemiology.
Most recently, Helen’s team have harnessed their in vivo models to uncover the fundamental molecular adaptations that enable diverse cell types to resist and repair damage. These cytoprotective mechanisms are important within barrier tissues (e.g. the skin or airways) vulnerable to environmental damage (Weavers et al. 2019) but also within internal tissues (e.g. kidneys) to defend against endogenous threat (Holcombe & Weavers, 2023). Such self-defence strategies, which include redox control and metabolic reprogramming, limit cellular damage, ageing and death, so tissues can sustain or quickly restore function (Clemente and Weavers, 2023). In collaboration with clinicians, her group now use their experimental models to probe how dysregulated repair drives disease and find ways to therapeutically boost cellular resilience.
Alongside her Sir Henry Dale Fellowship, Helen holds a Lister Institute Research Prize and is Co-Director of Bristol’s Wellcome Trust PhD Programme in Dynamic Molecular Cell Biology. Helen is actively involved in patient and public engagement (supported by her recent NC3Rs Public Engagement Award), conference organisation, mentoring and widening participation. Her group regularly contribute new resources for the research community, including protocols (Weavers et al., 2018; Karling & Weavers, 2024) and bioinformatic tools (Turley et al., 2023).
You can read more about Helen’s work here (link www.tissueresilience.com).
Helen will be awarded the WICB Medal and give a talk about her research during the Biologists @ 100 conference which is being held jointly between BSCB and The company of Biologists on 24-27 March 202 at ACC Liverpool, UK.
The WICB Early Career Medal was established in 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the BSCB. It is an annual honour awarded to an outstanding female cell biologist who has started her own research group in the UK within the last seven years.