Biography

Tim Mitchison completed his undergraduate degree in biochemisty at Oxford University before moving to the University of California, San Francisco to do his PhD with Marc Kirschner. After a brief post-doc at National Institute for Medical Research in London, Mitchison returned to UCSF as an assistant professor in 1988. In the late 1990s, he moved to Harvard Medical School and he remains there now as a member of the Department of Systems Biology. As a graduate student, Mitchison first proposed “dynamic instability” as the mechanism to describe microtubule growth and disassembly and his lab continues to pioneer studies on the structure, function and dynamics of the cytoskeleton. Recent interests include understanding cancer chemotherapeutics that target the mitotic spindle.

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