Kate Storey facts for kids

Kate Storey is a British scientist who studies how living things grow and develop. She is especially interested in how the brain and nervous system form. Dr. Storey leads a big science team at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Understanding How Nerves Grow

Dr. Storey is a developmental biologist. This means she studies how cells and tiny molecules work together to build the nervous system, like the brain and spinal cord, in developing animals.

Early in her career, she found a key "switch" that tells cells when and where to start becoming nerve cells in a growing embryo. Later, she discovered how a signal called Fibroblast Growth Factor helps control which genes in cells can be "read" to make new nerve cells.

New Ways to See Cells

Dr. Storey and her colleague Jason Swedlow have also created new ways to watch cells in action. They use special imaging techniques to see how cells behave and send signals inside developing tissues.

These new methods helped them discover a new way cells divide, which they called "apical abscission." This process helps new nerve cells form and become different from other cells.

Dr. Storey's Journey in Science

After finishing her studies, Dr. Storey did research at the University of California, Berkeley from 1987 to 1988. She then worked at the University of Oxford from 1990 to 1994 with another famous scientist, Claudio Daniel Stern.

In 1994, she started her own research team at the University of Oxford. In 2000, she moved to the University of Dundee. There, she became a professor of Neural Development in 2007. Since 2010, she has been the head of the Division of Cell & Developmental Biology.

Awards and Honors

Dr. Storey has received many important awards and honors for her work. These show how much her research has helped us understand development.

• In 2012, she became a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
• In 2014, she joined the Lister Institute for Preventative Medicine.
• In 2016, she was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization.
• In 2017, she became a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
• She received the MRC Suffrage Science Heirloom Award in 2014.
• In 2015, she was given a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
• In May 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is one of the highest honors for a scientist in the UK.

Her research has been supported by important groups like the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

Science Meets Art

Dr. Storey has also worked on exciting projects that combine science and art. She collaborated with her sister, Helen Storey, who is a designer.

Their most famous project is called "Primitive Streak." It was created in 1997. The name comes from a structure that helps organize how tissues form in a very early embryo. This art exhibition showed the first 1000 hours of human embryonic development using a series of dresses and textiles. It helped people see and understand the amazing process of how life begins.