Professor Scott Waddell named Liliane Bettencourt Laureate

Professor Scott Waddell, Pembroke Research Fellow, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Neurobiology, is the latest Laureate of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences.

This prestigious medical research prize is awarded annually by a French Foundation to a young researcher working in the EU who is recognised within the scientific community for their international publications, and who has built a team working on a promising area of research.

Professor Waddell’s team study the neural circuit properties of memory, motivation and behavioural individuality in the fruit fly.

The Bettencourt Foundation specifically recognised Professor Waddell’s recent discovery of jumping genes, or neural transposition, in memory-relevant neurons in the fly brain (Perrat et al., 2013, Science). Retrotransposition of LINE-1 elements has been observed in the human brain where it may contribute to cellular and behavioural individuality, in addition to a number of neurological disorders that have been difficult to map using classical genetic approaches.