Interview with the 2024 Hooke Medal winner Emmanuel Derivery

ABSTRACT Emmanuel Derivery is a Group Leader in Cell Biology at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. He earned his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the Institut Curie and Paris-Sud University in France, where he studied actin polymerisation and nucleation complexes in the lab of Alexis Gautreau. As a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow with Marcos Gonzalez-Gaitan at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, he delved into understanding how the cytoskeleton regulates the distribution of cell contents in asymmetric cell division. Emmanuel started his own lab at the LMB in 2016, where he has combined innovative methods of in vitro reconstitution, synthetic biology and quantitative imaging to dissect the molecular signals and pathways that polarise asymmetrically dividing cells. In 2024, he was awarded the Hooke Medal by the British Society for Cell Biology in recognition of outstanding contributions to UK cell biology. We spoke with Emmanuel about building his interdisciplinary lab and his exciting collaborations in the fast-moving field of protein design, as well as what this award means to him and his team.