Frances Ashcroft

Frances Mary Ashcroft (born February 15, 1952 ) is a British zoologist, human geneticist and physiologist ( diabetes mellitus , ion channels ). She teaches at Oxford University .

Live and act

Ashcroft studied science at Cambridge University , where he received his doctorate in zoology in 1978 ( Calcium electrogenesis in insect muscle ). She was a post-doctoral student at the University of Leicester and the University of California, Los Angeles . She is a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Center of Gene Function and holds a Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Research Professorship .

She explores how an increase in blood sugar ( glucose ) leads to increased secretion of insulin by the cells of the islets of Langerhans and how malfunctions lead to various forms of diabetes (especially a rare congenital form of diabetes mellitus in newborns). She found that ATP- sensitive potassium ion channels play an important role in regulating insulin release. With Andrew Hattersley (Professor at Exeter University) she developed an oral tablet-based replacement therapy with sulfonylureas for injecting insulin for neonatal diabetes mellitus in newborns.

In 1999 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society . Since 2001 she has been a full member of the Academia Europaea . In 2015 she became Dame Commander of the DBE . In 2007 she received the Walter B. Cannon Award and in 2012 the UNESCO L'Oréal Prize for Europe. She is an honorary doctor from the Open University and the University of Leicester. In 2013 she gave the Croonian Lecture ( From bench to bedside: KATP channels and neonatal diabetes ). For 2018 Ashcroft was awarded the Jacob Henle Medal .

She received the Lewis Thomas Prize for her book Spark of Life about electricity in the body . In 2010 she received the Feldberg Foundation Prize .

Fonts

• Ion Channels and Disease, Academic Press 2012
• Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival, Harper Collins 2000
• The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body, Penguin 2012
• with P. Rorsman: Diabetes and the beta-cell: the last ten years , in: Cell 148, 2012, pp. 1160-1171.

Web links

• Homepage at Trinity College .