Fiona Marshall (pharmacologist) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Fiona Marshall FRS FMedSci
Marshall speaking at the National Institutes of Health 2017 Daly lecture
Born	Fiona Hamilton Marshall
Alma mater	University of Bath (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Drug discovery GPCRs Neuroscience
Institutions	Novartis Merck & Co. GlaxoSmithKline
Thesis	Cholecystokinin/dopamine interactions in the rat basal ganglia (1990)
Doctoral advisor	John Hughes

Fiona Hamilton Marshall is a brilliant British scientist. She is a pharmacologist, which means she studies how medicines work. She also helps start new biotech companies. Currently, she is the President of Biomedical Research at Novartis, a big healthcare company.

Fiona Marshall started a company called Heptares Therapeutics. She was its Chief Scientific Officer. This company was later bought by Sosei, a Japanese company. She is also a respected member of important science groups. She became a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016. In 2021, she was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. These are big honors for scientists.

Early Life and Learning

Fiona Marshall loved science from a young age. In high school, she was very interested in biology, chemistry, and physics. When she was a teenager, she even won a prize in a national physics competition.

She went to the University of Bath and earned a top degree in biochemistry in 1987. After that, she studied at the University of Cambridge. There, she focused on neuroscience, which is the study of the brain and nervous system. Her professor, John Hughes, worked at a research center. This inspired Fiona to work in the pharmaceutical industry, making new medicines.

Her Amazing Science Career

After finishing her studies, Fiona Marshall joined GlaxoSmithKline. This is a large pharmaceutical company. She worked in the neuropharmacology department. This team studied how medicines affect the nervous system. She looked at how different signals in the body work.

By 1999, after only nine years, she became the Head of Molecular Pharmacology. This meant she led a team studying how drugs interact with tiny parts of cells. Later, she moved to a group that studied G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). These are like tiny switches on cells. About one-third of all medicines work by targeting these GPCRs.

Fiona Marshall was the first to find and describe the GABAB receptor. This is an important type of GPCR. In 2000, she joined another company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals. She became their Director of Molecular Pharmacology. When her children were young, she worked as a consultant. This allowed her to have a more flexible schedule.

Starting Heptares Therapeutics

Fiona Marshall, along with Malcolm Weir, Christopher Tate, and Richard Henderson, started Heptares Therapeutics. This company used new technologies to study GPCRs. They could look at these cell switches very closely. This helped them design new medicines.

For example, Heptares helped create a new medicine for cancer. This medicine was licensed to AstraZeneca in 2015. Later that year, Heptares became part of Sosei, a Japanese biopharmaceutical company.

Leading Research at Big Companies

In 2018, Fiona Marshall joined Merck & Co. She became the Head of their UK Discovery Research Centre. Here, she focused on diseases that affect people as they get older. In 2019, she became the Global Head of Neuroscience Discovery. She led research into new brain medicines for two years.

After that, she was promoted to Senior Vice President of Discovery, Preclinical & Translational Medicine Research. In 2022, she became the President of Biomedical Research at Novartis. This is a very important role where she leads a lot of new medicine research.

Awards and Special Honors

Fiona Marshall has received many awards for her important work:

• 2012: WISE Campaign award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This award celebrates women in science and engineering.
• 2015: Royal Society of Chemistry Malcolm Campbell Award.
• 2016: Elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci).
• 2016: Received an honorary degree from the University of Bath.
• 2018: Vane Medal from the British Pharmacological Society.
• 2018: Became an Honorary Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society.
• 2021: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).