Dr Emma Rawlins

The Unit's Affiliated Memberships aim to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists and experts from across the world with the MRC Toxicology Unit and its groups. Affiliated Members are linked to a group and provide the Affiliates with access to the Unit, its expertise and wider opportunities, making them highly valued members of the Unit's research community.

Emma Rawlins is a senior Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, where her research focuses on lung development and regeneration. 

Emma Rawlins obtained her PhD in developmental biology from the University of Edinburgh in 2002. She performed postdoctoral work with Prof Brigid Hogan at Duke University in 2004–2009 where she identified stem cell populations in the developing, homeostatic and repairing mouse lungs.

In 2009 she started her lab at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge and in 2020 was promoted to senior Group Leader. Emma is a member of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. Her lab works on lung stem and progenitor cell biology, combining innovative human organoid models with mouse genetics.

How do stem cells build and maintain the lung? The complicated three-dimensional structure of our lungs is essential for respiration and host defence. Building this structure relies on the correct sequence of division and differentiation events by lung progenitor cells, which also maintain the slowly turning-over airway epithelium in the adult. How is the production of different cell types controlled in embryonic development and adult maintenance?

We apply mouse genetics, live imaging, single-cell molecular analysis and mathematical modelling to understand lung stem cells, with a longer-term aim of directing endogenous lung cells to repair, or regenerate, diseased tissue.