Christine
Holt

Christine Holt is a professor emerita of developmental neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Having had an interest in nature since childhood, she studied biological sciences at the University of Sussex in the 1970s. She moved on to do a PhD in biophysics under John Scholes at King’s College London, investigating initial events during the formation of the visual system of the frog Xenopus.

She completed her PhD in 1982 and went on to do postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In 1992, Holt was hired by the biology department at UCSD, where she was able to build her own research group, investigating how axons navigate in developing brains. In 1997, she moved back to the UK with her husband, whom she’d met at UCSD, and took up a position at the University of Cambridge.

It was here, in the early 2000s, that she showed that severed axons in the developing brain could navigate without contact with the cell body – suggesting axons have their own machinery for supplying the necessary proteins. The work helped break the dogma that such proteins are created in the cell body. More recently, her work has demonstrated an important link between this process, called local translation, and neurodegenerative disorders such as ALS.

Holt has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Remedios Caro Almela Prize for Research in Developmental Neurobiology), the Champalimaud Vision Award, the Royal Society Ferrier Medal, the Rosenstiel Award and, most recently the Brain Prize in 2023.