Iain Fraser's Biography

Iain Fraser, Head Laboratory of Systems Biology, National Institutes of Health

Iain Fraser is head of the Signaling Systems Unit in the Laboratory of Systems Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health. He received his B.S. in biochemistry from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Imperial College, University of London. He was a Wellcome Trust International postdoctoral fellow at the Vollum Institute and then co-director of the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS) molecular biology group at the California Institute of Technology. He was appointed as an Investigator at the NIH in 2008. His research has focused on the mechanistic basis of cellular signaling, both in G protein signaling systems and more recently in Toll-like receptor signaling in innate immune cells. He applies systems biology approaches to decipher how mammalian cells integrate stimuli in a complex environment to ensure context-dependent cellular responses. This is vital to understanding how a breakdown in information processing through cell-surface receptors and their linked signal transduction pathways leads to human disease. Dr. Fraser has developed sophisticated approaches for RNAi-based perturbation analysis of immune cell signaling, as well as cloning platforms and plasmid repositories for high-throughput imaging and cell biological applications.