Sir Philip Cohen -Biographical Note

Philip Cohen received his B.Sc (1966) and Ph.D (1969) at University College London and then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow with Edmond Fischer at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.  In 1971 he returned to the UK to become a Faculty member of the University of Dundee, Scotland where he has worked ever since.  He has been a Royal Society Research Professor since 1984, Director of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit since 1990, and became the Founding Director of the Scottish Institute for Cell Signalling in 2008.  From 2006-2009 he is the honorary President of the British Biochemical Society.

For the past thirty-nine years Philip's major research interest has been to understand the role of protein phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease.  Over this period he has made important contributions to our understanding of the control of glycogen metabolism, the structure and regulation of protein phosphatases, MAP kinase cascades and insulin signal transduction. Currently his laboratory is focussed on working out the signalling pathways that trigger the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and interferons during infection by bacteria and viruses.

Philip has received numerous awards for his research contributions, including the Swiss Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Prix Van Gysel of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, the Pfizer award for Innovative Science in Europe, the Bristol Myers Squibb Distinguished Achievement Award in Metabolic Research, the Karolinska Institute's Rolf Luft Prize, the Society for Biomolecular Sciences Achievement Award and the Colworth and Novartis Medals of the British Biochemical Society.  He was elected to the Fellowships of both The Royal Society of London and The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1984, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in 2008 and was knighted by the Queen in 1998.  He has received honorary doctorates from six Universities.

Philip has published over 490 peer-reviewed papers and given over 250 invited lectures at scientific meetings in 34 different countries.  According to Thomson Scientific Philadelphia he was the world's second most cited scientist from 1993-2003 in the field of Biology and Biochemistry.

His main hobbies are golf, ornithology, picking wild mushrooms, bridge and chess.