Jonathon Noë Joseph Pines (born 1961) is Head of the Cancer Biology Division at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. He was formerly a senior group leader at the

Gurdon Institute The Gurdon Institute (officially the Wellcome/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute) is a research facility at the University of Cambridge, specialising in developmental biology and cancer biology. History The Institute was founded in 1989 to prov ...

at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

Education

Pines was educated at the

where he was awarded a PhD in 1987 for research on cyclin in sea urchin eggs supervised by

Tim Hunt Sir Richard Timothy Hunt, (born 19 February 1943) is a British biochemist and molecular physiologist. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H. Hartwell for their discoveries of protein molec ...

Research and career

Following his PhD, Pines was a

postdoctoral researcher A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

supervised by Anthony R. Hunter at the

Salk Institute The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vacci ...

La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood within the city of San Diego, California, United States, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781. La Jolla is surrounded on ...

, California before moving to the

at the

then the Institute of Cancer Research in 2015. Pines research investigates cyclin, the

cell cycle The cell cycle, or cell-division cycle, is the series of events that take place in a cell that cause it to divide into two daughter cells. These events include the duplication of its DNA (DNA replication) and some of its organelles, and sub ...

and mitosis. He pioneered the use of

fluorescent tag In molecular biology and biotechnology, a fluorescent tag, also known as a fluorescent label or fluorescent probe, is a molecule that is attached chemically to aid in the detection of a biomolecule such as a protein, antibody, or amino acid. Gener ...

s to analyse the dynamic behaviour and stability of these regulators in living cells. Pines discoveries have revealed that mitotic regulators are targeted to specific substructures at specific times, and that mitosis is exquisitely coordinated by the destruction of key regulators at different times in cell division. Pines work has provided insights into how chromosome behaviour in mitosis controls both the time and the rate at which essential mitotic regulators are destroyed, and these discoveries have wider implications for how cancers develop.

Awards and honours

Pines was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2001 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2005. His citation on election reads: Pines was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: Institute of Cancer Research, London

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pines, Jonathon Living people Fellows of the Royal Society Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences (United Kingdom) 1961 births Alumni of the University of Cambridge Biologists at the University of Cambridge Academics of the Institute of Cancer Research