Claire Higgins, PhD | United Kingdom
Founders Lecturer
Dr. Claire Higgins was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London in April 2014, after postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Prof. Angela Christiano, in the Department of Dermatology, at Columbia University in New York. At Columbia she received a Career Development Award from the Dermatology Foundation to research the ‘Molecular basis of human hair follicle induction’. Claire obtained a Ph.D. in Skin Developmental Biology from Durham University in 2007, and holds a B.Sc. in Natural Sciences.
The main focus of her research group is to understand mechanisms of tissue development, and regeneration, both in normal conditions and in response to trauma. The hair follicle is used as a model, as it is an accessible and elegant system to study organ regeneration. Research into developmental, and regenerative processes means we can try and recreate them in a lab setting, and exploit the inherent properties of interacting cells to engineer new tissues and structures. Work in the group is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and the British Skin Foundation (BSF).
