Enrico Coen

Career In 1982, Coen became a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. He decided to study the mechanism of supergenes, gene clusters acting together to affect both evolution and development. As one of the best-defined supergenes was in primroses, he wrote a proposal, and was accepted as a research fellow in the lab of plant biologist Dick Flavell at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge.

After a year (1983/4) he sought a different plant system to continue his research at John Innes Centre in Norwich which studied Antirrhinum, commonly known as snapdragon, and was hired together with colleague Cathie Martin to join the lab of Brian Harrison and Rosemary Carpenter. In 1994 he published evidence of unity and logic of floral development across species on the molecular level as did the labs of Meyerowitz, of Zsuzsanna Schwarz-Sommer and Hans Sommer at Max Planck Institute in Cologne.

In the 1990s he collaborated with Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, a computer scientist knowledgeable in biological development at the University of Calgary and others computer modeling techniques to relate gene activity to patterns of growth and geometry.

Work Coen has written several books, including Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change That Shape Life, in which he postulates the seven ingredients which shape life: population variation, persistence, reinforcement, competition, co-operation, combinatorial richness and recurrence.

Awards and honours EMBO Gold Medal (1996) Linnean Medal (1997) In 1998 Coen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Foreign Associate of NAS (2001) In 2003 he was appointed a CBE for services to plant genetics. In 2004 Coen won the Darwin Medal, with Rosemary Carpenter. In 2012 he became President of the Genetics Society, finishing his 3-year term in 2015. In 2016 he received the Croonian Medal & Lecture from The Royal Society and the Waddington Medal from the British Society for Developmental Biology Coen is a member of Faculty of 1000.