Katrin Ottersbach PhD

Katrin Ottersbach grew up in Germany, but moved to Scotland in 1993 to obtain her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Edinburgh. She remained in Scotland for her PhD research, which was carried out at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow under the supervision of Prof. Gerard Graham. During her PhD, she worked on characterising the haematopoietic progenitor inhibitory function of the chemokine Ccl3, for which she was awarded the Thomas & Margaret Smellie prize from the University of Glasgow. After completion of her PhD in 2001, she moved to Rotterdam, Netherlands, to take up a postdoctoral position in the group of Prof. Elaine Dzierzak, supported by a personal fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. One of her achievements during her time in Prof. Dzierzak’s group was the discovery of the murine placental labyrinth region as a rich source of haematopoietic stem cells. In 2006, she moved to the University of Cambridge, UK, to set up her own lab at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research with the help of an Intermediate Fellowship from the Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund. In 2011, she was awarded a Senior Bennett Fellowship from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research. Her group became a member of the Wellcome Trust – Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute when it was formed in 2012. Since leading her own research group, she has published the first expression screen for haematopoietic regulators in the embryonic aortic region, discovered a negative regulator of emerging haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells and uncovered a functional link between the developing haematopoietic and sympathetic nervous system. Current projects in the Ottersbach lab include further dissections of the niche components of emerging haematopoietic stem cells and the origins of infant leukaemia.