William C. Earnshaw

Biosketch

William Earnshaw is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended Colby College (Waterville, Maine), then completed his Ph.D. with Jonathan King at MIT in 1977. Postdoctoral training in Cambridge with Aaron Klug, Tony Crowther and Ron Laskey and in Geneva with Ulrich Laemmli were followed by 13 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996 as a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow. He is an elected member/fellow of EMBO, the Academia Europaea, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He co-authors the textbook Cell Biology with Tom Pollard, Graham Johnson and Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz (4th edition published 2024).

Research Interests

William Earnshaw’s research focuses on chromosome packaging and segregation during cell division using an integrated multidisciplinary approach involving light and electron microscopy, computer modelling, proteomics, synthetic biology, chemical genetics, high-throughput genomics and gene targeting/knockout technologies. He was the first to identify and clone centromere proteins in any species. He discovered the chromosomal passenger complex containing INCENP, Aurora B kinase, Survivin and Borealin. He developed the first in vitro system to study apoptotic cell death. He designed the first human synthetic chromosome. He used machine learning to determine the complete proteome of vertebrate mitotic chromosomes. His team perfected chemical-genetic tools allowing cells to enter mitosis with unparalleled synchrony with or without depletion of target proteins. Application of this system in an interdisciplinary collaboration answered a long-standing question, revealing mitotic chromosomes to be a network of nested DNA loops emanating from a disorderly axial network of condensin II.