Researcher profile

Karim Labib

Karim studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, before moving to Oxford as a PhD student with Paul Nurse. Subsequently, Karim spent periods as a postdoctoral fellow with Sergio Moreno in Salamanca, Stephen Kearsey in Oxford and John Diffley in London. In 2001, Karim started his group at what is now the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute. Karim was selected to join the EMBO Young Investigator Programme in 2004, and in 2010 Karim was elected a member of EMBO and received the Hooke medal from the British Society for Cell Biology. Karim moved as Professor of Genome Integrity to Dundee in 2013 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016. Karim’s group initially studied the regulation of chromosome duplication in budding yeast, but current work focuses on regulation that is specific to animal cells, using a multi-disciplinary approach that involves the nematode C. elegans, mammalian cell biology and biochemistry. Karim’s group has made many important contributions to our understanding of the eukaryotic replisome, and particularly to the mechanisms of replisome assembly and disassembly that underpin the once-per-cell-cycle duplication of eukaryotic chromosomes.