Wendy Bickmore

Early life and education Bickmore was born at Shoreham-by-Sea on 28 July 1961 to Beryl and Keith Bickmore. and she went on to study biochemistry at St Hugh's College, Oxford graduating with a BA. She then undertook a PhD at the University of Edinburgh analysing nucleic acid sequences from the Y chromosome of humans. Her supervisors were Howard Cooke and Adrian Bird. She was an independent fellow at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine from 1991 until 1996. how this process is regulated during development to facilitate the expression of genes, and how aberrant genome organisation is linked to disease.

In 2020, she was recognised for her research examining the likelihood that people will develop serious symptoms of the COVID-19 disease.

Bickmore was president of The Genetics Society from 2015 until 2018.

As of 2021, she is director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh.

She is a member of the editorial board for Genes & Development.

Selected publications

Awards and honours Bickmore was awarded EMBO Membership in 2001, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2005 She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to biomedical sciences and women in science.

Personal life She is a member of the organisation Trees for Life which is working to restore the forest in the Highlands of Scotland.