Elizabeth Robertson

Elizabeth Jane Robertson is a British developmental biologist based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. She is Professor of Developmental Biology at Oxford and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. She is best known for her pioneering work in developmental genetics, showing that genetic mutations could be introduced into the mouse germ line by using genetically altered embryonic stem cells. This discovery opened up a major field of experimentation for biologists and clinicians.
Education.
Robertson earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Oxford. She received a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1982 under the supervision of Martin Evans.
Career and research.
After her PhD, she stayed on at the University of Cambridge for her postdoctoral fellowship and continued to work there as a research assistant following the completion of her fellowship. She was a professor first at Columbia University and then Harvard University before moving to the University of Oxford. In her lab at Columbia she was the first to show that embryonic stem cells carrying genetic mutations could contribute to all parts of the adult mouse body, including the cells that eventually make up the gametes, i.e. sperm and egg cells, allowing these mutations to be transmitted to the next generation. She used this approach to test the role of specific growth factors in embryonic development, and to screen for previously unknown genes that prevent normal development. Robertson's work was among the first to show that the disruption of many genes has surprisingly little effect on development and organismal phenotype, contributing to a long-running challenge in the understanding of the robustness of biological systems. She has also made significant contributions to the question of how the early embryo determines the anterior-posterior polarity that patterns the embryo from head to tail and the mechanisms that pattern the embryo from left to right.
Robertson currently serves as an editor of the journal "Development." She serves on the editorial boards of "Developmental Biology", "Current Opinion in Genetics & Development", and "Developmental Cell".