Stephen C. West

Stephen C. West is a Senior Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. He has been a leader in the fields of genetic recombination and DNA repair for the past three decades. His work crosses the boundaries between basic research studies of DNA repair and tumourigenesis, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at major international meetings. Steve plays an active role in the organization of international conferences and currently organizes the biannual ‘Recombination Mechanisms’ conference.

He also organized (with Hans Clevers) the first Annual EMBO Conference in 2009 and is coorganizer of a number of DNA repair conferences in Europe and Asia.

His research centers on mechanisms of genetic recombination and DNA strand break repair. In particular, he has defined relationships between defective DNA repair processes and human diseases such as inheritable breast cancer and neurological disorders.