Margaret Buckingham

Margaret Buckingham, (born 2 March 1945) is a French-British developmental biologist working in the fields of myogenesis and cardiogenesis. She is an honorary professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and emeritus director in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Academia Europaea and the French Academy of Sciences.

Biography Margaret Buckingham was educated in Scotland and at Oxford University where she obtained B.A., M.A. and D.Phil. degrees in Biochemistry. As a postdoc, she then joined François Gros at the Pasteur Institute in Paris where she subsequently pursued her scientific career. She is an honorary professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus director in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). She is a member of the scientific council of the ERC and chairs the prize committee of the Lefoulon-Delalande Foundation for cardiovascular research. In 2013, she was awarded the gold medal of the CNRS. She is a member of the French Academy of sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London/Edinburgh and an International member of the National Academy of Sciences USA. She is also a member of EMBO and of the Academia Europaea. She was a member of the scientific council of the ERC from 2016–2022. In addition to chairing the prize committee of the Lefoulon-Delalande Foundation, she also chairs the Pasteur Institute Ethics committee. She is currently a member of the scientific commission of the Institut Curie in Paris and of the scientific advisory board of the Human Developmental Biology Initiative in the UK.

She has French and British nationality, and is married to Richard Buckingham (Editor-in-Chief of Biochimie, until December 2020), with three children.

Scientific research Margaret Buckingham is a developmental biologist who is interested in how naïve multipotent cells acquire tissue specificity during embryogenesis. She has studied both the formation of skeletal muscle and of the heart, using the tools of mouse molecular genetics to characterise cell behaviour and to identify the genes that govern cell fate choices.

Her main contribution to cardiogenesis is the identification of the second heart field (SHF) as a major source of cardiac progenitor cells that form specific regions of the heart. The behaviour of these cells is controlled by gene regulatory networks and signalling pathways, exemplified by the FGF10 gene. Retrospective clonal analysis complemented their work on the SHF and established a lineage tree for the myocardium, where the second lineage defines the SHF contribution whereas the first lineage contributes all the left ventricular myocardium. This analysis revealed the clonal relationships between different sublineages that contribute to both cardiac muscle at the poles of the heart and anterior skeletal muscles which are not under Pax3-control. In addition to its conceptual importance for cardiogenesis, this work also has biomedical implications for congenital heart malformations.

Awards and honours Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), 1979 Prix Jaffé of the Académie des sciences, 1990 Member of the Academia Europaea, 1998 CNRS Silver Medal, 1999 Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, 2002 Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite, 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Developmental Biology, 2010 Officier de la Légion d'honneur, 2011 International member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2011 Fellow of the Royal Society, 2013 CNRS Gold Medal, 2013 Commandeur de Ordre National du Mérite, 2013 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2014 Commandeure de la Légion d'Honneur, 2018 Grand Officier of the Légion d’Honneur, 2023