Professor Neil Watkins

Senior Scientist & Research Fellow

Centre for Cancer Research

Professor Watkins grew up in Perth before graduating from the University of WA, School Of Medicine. He then trained as a specialist physician at Sir Charles Gairdner and Royal Perth Hospitals before starting his research career with a PhD in Dr Phil Thompson's laboratory at the UWA Department of Medicine.

In 1998 he moved to the United States to work as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr Steve Baylin's laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University Kimmel Cancer Centre in Baltimore.

After five years at Johns Hopkins, he was promoted to Assistant Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and ran a research laboratory at the Kimmel Cancer focusing on developmental biology and cancer, and was involved in research on embryonic signalling pathways in cancer that have led to the development of new drugs currently in clinical trials at the Kimmel Cancer Centre.

He has been recognised with numerous awards, including a National Cancer Institute Career Development Award, the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Foundation Fellowship, and a General Motors Award for Cancer Research. His laboratory at Hopkins is currently supported by the NIH, the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute and major philanthropic support.

Dr Watkins was recently recruited to the position Professor of Cancer Biology at MIMR, where he plans to continue his work exploring the role of embryonic signalling pathways in many different cancers, and how they might be targeted by novel therapies. His major research interests also include lung cancer, the relationship between injury repair and cancer, epigenetics and neural development in paediatric brain tumours.