Yale University, School of Medicine, Chair, Department of Cell Biology

Yale School of Medicine has named Gillian Griffiths, PhD, FRS as its Chair of the Department of Cell Biology.

Griffiths is currently a professor and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge, where she previously served as institute director. A distinguished member of the scientific community, Griffiths was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society; a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) member; and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. She currently serves as chair of the Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship Committee and is a member of scientific advisory boards for several cell biology institutes, including the European Institute for Oncology (IEO), Milan, and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, and previously served on the Scientific Council, Institut Pasteur, Paris.

Griffiths currently serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and on the editorial boards for the Journal of Cell Science, BMC Biology, and Current Opinion in Cell Biology. Previously, she served on the editorial board for the Journal of Cell Biology and as editor for Traffic. She also authored The Freedom to Succeed, a review of non-clinical fellowships in the UK by the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Griffiths received a bachelor’s degree in zoology from University College London and a PhD in molecular biology from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. She carried out postdoctoral research at Stanford before starting her own lab at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland.

Read the full press release here. 

Ariannah Mirick led this search with Jane McInerney and Madeleine Ruth.