Silvia SantosCentre for Digital Life Norway Lecture
Group leader of the Quantitative Cell Biology Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK

Silvia Santos is, since 2017, group leader of the Quantitative Cell Biology Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in London. She has her PhD from EMBL-Heidelberg, working as a Marie Curie E-Star fellow with Philippe Bastiaens and she did her postdoctoral training with Jim Ferrell and Tobias Meyer at Stanford.
Santos started her independent research in 2014 as an MRC career development awardee at the MRC-LMS in Imperial College London. The Santos Lab applies a highly multidisciplinary approach to elucidate underlying regulatory interactions that give rise to cellular transitions in cell division and differentiation in early development. By combining quantitative experimental methods with mathematical modelling, they are dissecting the spatio-temporal control principles of such fundamental cell decisionmaking. Using this approach, Santos and colleagues have identified key molecular interactions within the complex regulatory networks of cell division, which control onset and duration of mitosis. They have also identified topological differences in growth factor signalling networks, leading to occurrence of bi-stability and initiation of cell-fate decisions.
Selected publications
  • Gelens L, Santos SD (2019) Eternal sunshine of the spotless cycle. Mol Syst Biol. 15(4):e8864.
  • Ochoa D, Jonikas M, Lawrence RT, El Debs B, Selkrig J, Typas A, Villén J, Santos SD, Beltrao P. (2016) An atlas of human kinase regulation. Mol Syst Biol. 12(12): 888.
  • Araujo AR, Gelens L, Sheriff R, Santos SD (2016) Positive feedback keeps duration of mitosis temporally insulated from upstream cell-cycle events. Molecular Cell 64, 362-375
  • Santos SD, Wollman R, Meyer T, Ferrell JE (2012) Spatial positive feedback at the onset of mitosis. Cell 149, 1500-1513
  • Santos SD, Ferrell JE (2012) Spatial positive feedback at the onset of mitosis. Nature 7202, 288–289