Maxine Holder

Maxine grew up in Bristol (and if you ever doubt this, ask her to pronounce the word “larvae"!). She completed a BSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Bath, then moved to London to do a PhD at Imperial College, followed by a postdoc at Queen Mary University of London, both involving designing and testing viral vectors for gene therapy. In 2007 she switched fields to developmental biology, joining the lab of Julian Lewis at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, where she investigated roles of the Notch signalling pathway in the zebrafish segmentation clock and the mouse intestinal epithelium. When Julian retired in 2011, Maxine joined the lab of Nic Tapon, where she has remained ever since. Nic’s lab uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to investigate the mechanisms by which tissues attain their correct final size.