Mike Blatt - Deputy Chair

Mike Blatt studied at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver before transferring to the University of Wisconsin - Madison where he received a dual BSci with honours in Botany and Biochemistry. He obtained a PhD from Stanford University in 1981, completing his doctorate thesis on signalling and cellular motility while working in the Plant Biology Department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, located on the Stanford campus, and at the University of Nürnberg while a Fullbright-Hays Graduate Fellow. Mike worked on ion transport in the fungus Neurospora while an NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University Medical School and moved to England in 1983 where he pursued interests in membrane transport and signalling in stomatal guard cells at what was then the Botany School of the University of Cambridge. He held positions of Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Plant Cell Biology at the University of London, Wye College, and subsequently at Imperial College London. He was elected to the Regius Chair of Botany at Glasgow University in 2001 and to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2003. He is an honorary Fellow of the Scottish Crops Research Institute, holds an Adjuct Professorship at Pennsylvania State University and currently serves on the UK Research Councils (BBSRC) Panel of Experts. His research centres on the cell biology and biophysics of membranes, especially in relation to ion channels, their regulation and trafficking. Mike was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship during 2006 and 2007 which he took in the Cell Biology unit at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington,DC.