Magdalena Skipper is a British geneticist and the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature.[2] She previously served as an editor of Nature Reviews Genetics[3][4] and the open access journal Nature Communications.
Magdalena Skipper | |
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Alma mater | University of Nottingham (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)[1] |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Nature Springer Nature Laboratory of Molecular Biology University of Cambridge Imperial Cancer Research Fund |
Thesis | Primary sex determination mechanisms in Caenorhabditis elegans (1998) |
Academic advisors | Jonathan Hodgkin |
Skipper obtained a bachelor's degree in genetics at the University of Nottingham.[5][6] She completed her PhD in 1998 at the University of Cambridge, where she worked in Jonathan Hodgkin's lab investigating sex-determination systems in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.[1][7] She is a member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[8]
After completing her PhD she joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge.[9][7] She briefly worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, working on the notch signaling pathway of zebrafish in gut development.[7][10]
Skipper joined Nature in 2001 as an associate editor for Nature Reviews Genetics.[7] During her editorship she interviewed several high-profile scientists including Anne McLaren,[11] Mario Capecchi[12] and Oliver Smithies.[13] In 2002 she was appointed chief editor of Nature Reviews Genetics, and was promoted to associate publisher in 2008.[14][15] She serves on the advisory board of the Centre for Personalised Medicine at the University of Oxford.[16] Skipper worked briefly as Director for Scientific Communications at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Seattle.[5][8]
In 2018 she worked with Nature and Estée Lauder Companies to launch a global award for women in science.[17][18] She became the first woman editor-in-chief of Nature in its 150-year history in May 2018, when she succeeded Philip Campbell.[19][20][2] She has stated that she intends to ensure that science is reproducible and robust, as well as doing more to support early-career researchers.[19]