Kay Davies

Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies, DBE, FRS, is a British human geneticist born on April 1, 1951. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy in the University of Oxford and a fellow of Hertford College. She is director of the MRC functional genetics unit, a governor of the Wellcome Trust and, with Frances Ashcroft and Peter Donnelly is a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function.

Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In the 1980s she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of carrying DMD.

DMD occurs when the dystrophin protein fails to express in muscle cells due to a mutation in the gene which codes for the protein. In 1989 Professor Davies discovered that the utrophin protein has similar properties to dystrophin and has since shown in mouse models that up regulation of the former protein in muscle cells can compensate for the absence of latter.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. She is an Executive Editor of the journal "Human Molecular Genetics."

She was born Kay Elizabeth Partridge in 1951 and educated at Gig Mill School (where she was in the same class as David Trotman), Stourbridge County High School for Girls, Somerville College, Oxford and Wolfson College, Oxford.

Already a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours.

External links

* [http://www.mrcfgu.ox.ac.uk/research/kay-e-davies Kay E. Davies homepage] in the MRC Functional Genetics Unit
* [http://www.anat.ox.ac.uk/groups/kedavies.htm Research of Kay E. Davies] on the molecular analysis of neuromuscular and neurological disorders