Michelle Lawson BSc, PhD, AFHEA

Michelle Lawson graduated from the University of Sheffield in 1997 with a BSc honours in Molecular Biology. She obtained her PhD in 2000 from the University of Bristol, after conducting my research at the Institute of Animal Health, investigating the use of cytokines as DNA vaccine adjuvants.

In 2000 she began her research career in the field of bone biology at the University of Oxford. While there she developed various biomaterials for bone scaffolding and a novel technique to measure the bone binding affinities of bisphosphonates, drugs used in the prevention of bone disease.

In 2005 she moved back to the University of Sheffield where she worked in Professor Peter Croucher’s Bone Biology Group in the Department of Human Metabolism. My research involved looking at the effects of bisphosphonates in preclinical models of multiple myeloma. In addition, she developed a novel multiphoton microscopy technique to allow the visualisation of single cancer cells in bone. This work led to the identification of several key molecules involved in the early stages of myeloma bone disease. In 2012 she became a Research Fellow in the Department of Oncology and she now lead my own research group.