Frances Ashcroft

Frances Ashcroft is the Royal Society GlaxoSmithKline Research Professor at the University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She holds BA, PhD and ScD degrees from Cambridge University and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1999. Her research focuses on ATP-sensitive potassium (K_ATP) channels and their role in insulin secretion, in both health and disease. She is interested in how K_ATP channel function relates to channel structure, how cell metabolism regulates channel activity, and how mutations in K_ATP channel genes cause human disease. The ultimate goal is to elucidate how a rise in the blood glucose concentration stimulates the release of insulin from the pancreatic beta-cells, what goes wrong with this process in type 2 diabetes, and how drugs used to treat this condition exert their beneficial effects. She has written a text book Ion Channels and Disease and is Director of OXION, a training and research programme on the integrative physiology of ion channels, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Further information can be found at Ashcroft Research