Richard Treisman, Principal Group Leader and Director of Research, leads the Signalling and Transcription lab at the Crick.
Richard was born in London in 1954. After a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge, he did a PhD on polyomavirus transcription and RNA processing with Bob Kamen at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), graduating in 1981. He then moved to Boston for postdoctoral work on globin gene expression and thalassemia genes with Tom Maniatis.
In 1984, he joined the staff of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he started working on how transcription is regulated by growth factors. Initially focusing on the Fos gene, he identified the transcription factor SRF and cloned its gene.
Richard returned to the ICRF in 1988, working on SRF's regulatory cofactors and their cognate signalling pathways. This led to the molecular characterisation of the TCF family of SRF cofactors as targets for MAP kinase signalling, and the demonstration that the MRTF transcription cofactors are novel G-actin binding proteins that sense fluctuations in G-actin concentration. His lab now investigates how cancer-linked cell signalling pathways interface with gene transcription and with the actin cytoskeleton, the cell’s major structural framework, focusing on two main pathways: the serum response factor (SRF) network and the Rho-actin signalling pathway.
Richard is a member of EMBO and the Ffestiniog Railway Society, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences. For his work as a pioneer in the signal transduction and transcription fields, he was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal in 1995 and the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2002. In 2000 Richard became Director of the CRUK London Research Institute (LRI; formerly the ICRF), and he subsequently played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Crick and the transition of the LRI into the new institute, becoming the Crick's Director of Research at the institute's inception in 2015. He was knighted in 2016 for services to biomedical science and cancer research.
