What first attracted you to the area of neurogenetics and why is it important? 

I am a geneticist, actually a molecular geneticist by training. I’ve almost always worked with mouse models, that is mice with genetic mutations that model and/or help us understand human disease. This was back in the ice age, before the genome projects or even PCR had existed.  A mouse model I worked on in my early 30s bought me face to face with neurodegeneration – and this was fascinating – why do cells that function normally for years stop working?  So, combining mouse modelling and neurodegeneration was a natural route for me and when I moved to the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2001, this was a natural home for my mouse models, given the expertise all around me.

Can you tell us about your current research project and what you hope to achieve?

I’m a bit unusual in that I have two entirely separate main projects. The first is based on understanding the neurological basis of aspects of Down’s syndrome, and this is a project that I started with my collaborator, Victor Tybulewicz, in 1991. Victor is now a lab head at the Francis Crick institute, and we know each other because we shared an apartment when we were postdocs together in the late 1980s. The second project is based on getting at mechanism in different form of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka motor neuron disease.  

What aspect of your work most excites you and why?

Actually, it’s designing and then often spending years making the mice.  After that, getting them out to collaborators with different expertise, and hearing about the results, which push forward our understanding of each disorder and of biology. 

What would you say to someone who is considering whether to study the Clinical Neuroscience: Neuromuscular Disease MSc at UCL?

It’s an incredible opportunity to learn about what it is to be human, whether you go on to be an academic or not, it’s still a year well spent.

What’s the best advice you would give your younger self?

Your knees won’t last for ever. Make the most of them.

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Biography

Professor Elizabeth Fisher has an undergraduate degree from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, in Physiological Sciences (1978 – 1981). In 1983 she started a PhD in mouse molecular genetics, on the Microdissection and Microcloning of the Mouse X Chromosome at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School (Imperial College) and at the MRC Mammalian Genetics Unit in Harwell. In 2007 Professor Fisher was elected to become a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, in 2009 she became a Member of EMBO, and in 2010 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. She was a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, held jointly with Victor Tybulewicz.