Buzz Baum

Buzz Baum is a cell biologist interested in the way cells shape themselves now and how this has changed over the course of the history of life on earth. Buzz studied Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, obtained his PhD studying the cell division cycle with Sir Paul Nurse in London, and was a postdoctoral researcher with Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, where he studied morphogenesis in flies and fly cells. He returned to the UK in 2001, when he set up a lab at UCL studying cell shape control in animal cells during development and cell division. His team’s work has been highlighted by the New Scientist, the Economist, the BBC – most recently on “the Language Exchange”. In 2020 his lab moved to the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where his team is exploring the biology of TACK and Asgard archaea during cell growth and division, and is using archaea to study the evolution of complex cells. In doing so, his interdisciplinary team aims to put his and David Baum’s 2014 “inside-out model of eukaryogenesis” to the test.