Nick Barker, PhD
Research Director at A*STAR IMCB, Singapore, an adjunct Professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and a Visiting Professor at Kanazawa University, Japan
Prof Barker obtained his PhD from Reading University, UK in 1996. Together with Professor Hans Clevers, he identified dysregulated Wnt signaling as the initiating event in colon cancer. In 2001, he joined Semaia Pharmaceuticals to develop colon cancer therapeutics, then returned to Hans Clevers’ group as a Senior Staff Scientist in 2006, where he identified Lgr5 as a marker of various adult stem cell populations and intestinal Lgr5 stem cells as a cell-of-origin of colon cancer. Moving to Singapore in 2010, he joined A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) as a Senior Principal Investigator and subsequently promoted to the position of Research Director. In 2020, he transferred to A*STAR’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB). His research focuses on Lgr5 gastric stem cells in self-renewal and cancer. In 2017, he received the prestigious NRF Investigatorship and is recognized as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher with over 34,000 citations.