William C. Earnshaw

William Earnshaw grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (USA), home of the famous American painter Normal Rockwell, and he appears prominently in the 1968 painting “The Right to Know”, which was about the Vietnam war. He graduated from Colby College in Waterville Maine in 1972, then completed his Ph.D. with Jonathan King at MIT in 1977. Postdoctoral training in Cambridge with Aaron Klug, Tony Crowther and Ron Laskey and in Geneva with Ulrich Laemmli was followed by 13 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he rose to the rank of Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy. Earnshaw moved to Edinburgh in 1996 as a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. Throughout his career, his studies have focused on the packaging and segregation of chromosomes during cell division. Achievements during his time in Edinburgh include identification of the chromosomal passenger complex, construction of the first human synthetic artificial chromosome and its use to study the epigenetic regulation of kinetochore assembly, proteomics/systems analysis of the mitotic chromosome proteome, and advances in understanding the role of non-histone proteins in mitotic chromosome structure and function. Since moving to Edinburgh, he has been elected to EMBO, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of London.