Prof. Ken Sawin
Ken is from Boston, Massachusetts. He studied Physics and Philosophy at Yale University but became interested in Cell Biology during his final undergraduate year. After graduating, he worked with Daniel Mazia at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, studying mitosis in sea urchin embryos, and was later a student in the Physiology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. He obtained his PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California San Francisco, working with Tim Mitchison on mitotic spindle assembly, microtubule dynamics, and microtubule motor proteins, using the Xenopus egg extract system. He began working with fission yeast as a post-doctoral fellow with Paul Nurse at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), studying microtubule organization and its role in regulating cell polarity. He started the lab in 2000 as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.