Researcher

Nick Barker is currently a Research Director at A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (A*STAR IMCB). He is also an Adjunct Professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore, and a Visiting Professor at Kanazawa University, Japan. Barker obtained his PhD from Reading University, UK, in 1996. Together with Professor Hans Clevers, he identified dysregulated Wnt signalling as the initiating event in colon cancer. In 2001, he joined Semaia Pharmaceuticals to develop colon cancer therapeutics, before returning to Hans Clevers’ group as a Senior Staff Scientist in 2006, where he identified Lgr5 as a marker of various adult stem cell populations and intestinal Lgr5 stem cells as a cell-of-origin of colon cancer. Moving to Singapore in 2010, he joined A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) as a Senior Principal Investigator before moving to his current position at A*STAR IMCB. His research focuses on Lgr5+ and Aqp5+ stem cells in tissue homeostasis and cancer within the gastrointestinal tract. In 2017, he received the prestigious NRF Investigatorship and has been recognised as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2019 with over 40,000 citations. In 2022, he was elected to EMBO as an Associate Member and was awarded the Japanese Cancer Association International prize for cancer research.