Michael L Roberts

Biography

I started my career by studying Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow and was fortunate enough to gain a first class honours degree, which allowed me to move straight into a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Since my undergraduate days I had a very strong interest in understanding how genes are controlled and so my thesis was focussed on examining how expression of pro-survival genes help shape neuronal plasticity in the peripheral nervous system. After completing my PhD I decided to take on a Post-Doc position at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I worked on developing novel gene therapies for neuromuscular disorders and it was there that I first read about synthetic promoters. I decided to take on a Marie Curie fellowship so that I could travel to Greece and learn about utilising functional genomics in the study of cancer and it was the switch from gene therapy to genomics that seeded the idea of the technology underpinning Synpromics.

Research Interest

I started my career by studying Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow and was fortunate enough to gain a first class honours degree, which allowed me to move straight into a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Since my undergraduate days I had a very strong interest in understanding how genes are controlled and so my thesis was focussed on examining how expression of pro-survival genes help shape neuronal plasticity in the peripheral nervous system. After completing my PhD I decided to take on a Post-Doc position at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I worked on developing novel gene therapies for neuromuscular disorders and it was there that I first read about synthetic promoters. I decided to take on a Marie Curie fellowship so that I could travel to Greece and learn about utilising functional genomics in the study of cancer and it was the switch from gene therapy to genomics that seeded the idea of the technology underpinning Synpromics.