Andrew Carter, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society is a Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists, and is the oldest academy in continuous existence.
Each year, the Fellows of the Royal Society elect up to 85 new Fellows and up to 24 new Foreign Members. Candidates for Fellowship must be nominated by two existing Fellows and have made a significant contribution to research, including medical science, mathematics, and engineering science.
Andrew has been a Group Leader at the LMB since 2010. His research focuses on understanding the structure and mechanism of dyneins; a family of large motor proteins whose functions range from driving the beating of cilia that clear mucus from our lungs, to moving and organising the contents of our cells. To this end, his group have recently discovered a novel protein which packages dynein motors for delivery into the cilia, and used electron cryo-microscopy to reveal the first high-resolution structure of the dynein-dynactin complex bound to microtubules.
Andrew received an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Queen’s College, Oxford, before completing a Ph.D. with Venki Ramakrishnan at the LMB, focusing on X-ray crystallographic studies of the bacterial small ribosomal subunit. He began his work on dynein as a postdoc with Ron Vale at the University of California, San Francisco, before starting his own research group at the LMB.
Andrew’s work has previously been recognised with election to EMBO membership in 2016, and the 2023 Hooke Medal from the British Society for Cell Biology.
Congratulations also to LMB alumni David Bentley, David Komander, and William Wisden who have also been elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Alumna Ruth Lehmann joins them as a new Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Further references
Andrew’s group page
The Royal Society Press Release
LMB Royal Society Awards & Honours List