Dr L. Miguel Martins

Miguel obtained his PhD in Molecular Medicine from the University of Porto, Portugal, while working at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (USA) and the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) on cell death mechanisms with Prof. William C. Earnshaw. He then moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories (now CRUK) to work on cellular signalling with Dr Julian Downward.  Miguel was appointed to his first independent position as a Programme Leader with the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2003.

The aim of Miguel’s research programme is understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that mitochondria use, as signaling hubs, for coping with toxic insults.  We aim to manipulate these signaling mechanisms to protect tissues such as heart, liver and the brain from toxicity following exposure and in disease conditions.  Thus, this is a cell biology-based programme that aims to provide detailed, applicable, mechanistic toxicology, to identify the molecular initiating events and downstream toxicity pathways, associated with loss of mitochondrial function, that are disease relevant.