Freedom to follow the science

From gums as the body’s most overlooked battleground, to infections that leave their mark on memory, four Lister Fellows reflect on breakthrough findings and experiences over five years of unrestricted Lister Prize Fellowship funding. Their stories span continents and disciplines, but they all have common themes: bold questions, academic freedom, and a life-long community of peers and mentors.

Rickie Patani

When glial cells stopped being bystanders

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The Fellowship did not just fund experiments; it funded a way of thinking, one unconstrained by the tractable, the fundable or the incremental._”

Rickie has spent his career chasing what he calls a deceptively simple question: why do neurons die in motor neuron disease (MND). When his Lister Prize arrived in 2021, his lab was split across UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and the Francis Crick Institute with clinical practice based at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. The Lister’s flexible, unrestricted funding allowed him to develop entirely new tools and datasets that no conventional grant timeline would have allowed.

“The Fellowship did not just fund experiments,” he reflects, “it funded a way of thinking, one unconstrained by the tractable, the fundable or the incremental.” That freedom underpinned the clearest breakthrough of his Fellowship years: demonstrating that astrocytes are not innocent bystanders but active, toxic contributors to motor neuron death, a finding he calls “a genuine match struck in a dark room moment,” and one that opened a new class of potential therapeutic targets. That work fed directly into a My Name’5 Doddie Foundation programme examining DNA damage in MND.

Rickie's lab primarily works on hypothesis-driven, candidate-based research, and being part of the wider Lister community helped balance that with more hypothesis-generating, unbiased screening approaches. “That cross-pollination would not have happened inside a single-discipline funding scheme,” he says, adding that his biggest lesson has been to appreciate that “prior scientific experience and expertise matter far less than the question that genuinely grips you." It also coincided with a significant shift: a move to Singapore, where he became Director of both the Fundamental and Translational Neuroscience Programmes at the National University of Singapore, drawn in part by the opportunity to push the lab's most promising work toward novel therapeutics and diagnostics with broad impact.

Hayley Sharpe

The chemistry of growing older

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The Lister Prize allowed us to pay outright and get new mouse models made. Standard grants would not typically allow you to develop a new mouse model._”

Hayley Sharpe applied to the Lister Prize proposing to study how protein tyrosine phosphatases behave when oxidised. Five years on, her lab at the Babraham Institute has, in her words, “gone fully into the redox field.” The Fellowship’s flexibility let her build a toolkit of bespoke mouse and Drosophila models that no standard grant would have supported. And that hard graft has already produced new insights into developmental patterns of redox regulation and an interest in a how redox signalling, not just oxidative stress, changes with ageing. “With ageing you paradoxically see a decline in cysteine oxidation in a number of tissues, not the increase you might expect,” Hayley explains.

She’s now building out a whole raft of studies to try and understand how redox chemistry at the molecular level affects whole-organism physiology and multimorbidity. The Fellowship’s catalytic effect is striking as her results have underpinned a subsequent ERC Consolidator Grant as well as a Wellcome Discovery Award application which was conceptualised during a conversation at a Lister annual meeting.

Joanne Konkel

The open wound that medicine overlooked

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It was only because we sat together at a Lister event and got talking that this collaboration happened at all._”

Joanne has spent her Lister Prize Fellowship making the case for an overlooked disease site: the gum. Periodontitis, she points out, is the most common chronic inflammatory condition in humans, yet, as she puts it, there are no so-called medical interventions for it, because gum health is the preserve of dentists. “Dental clinics and medical clinics don’t really talk to each other,” Joanne observes.

Trained as a T cell biologist, Joanne used the Fellowship’s flexibility to “borrow” a colleagues’ expertise and explore monocytes and macrophages, immune cell types outside of her own specialism. That exploration led to a breakthrough: the team showed that immune cells can be generated locally at the gingiva, rather than arriving solely from the bone marrow, a discovery with real implications for how periodontitis might progress and eventually be treated. The Fellowship also produced unexpected human dividends: a joint PhD studentship that emerged from an informal conversation with another Lister Fellow. “It was only because we sat together at a Lister event and got talking that this collaboration happened at all,” Joanne reflects. The Prize has since catalysed a senior Wellcome Trust Fellowship, consolidating her transition from early to mid-career scientist. Joanne is unequivocal about the value of the Prize: her early speculative work would not have been funded via any other mechanism, but it has now become the backbone of her research programme at the University of Manchester.

Tomás Ryan

A network of excellence

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A network of excellence means the admission to the network is about your proven ability to deliver original science to a higher level of competitiveness, and that’s actually very inclusive. That’s actually very meritocratic._”

Tomás used his Lister Prize to move into a niche area he had never previously worked in: mechanisms of memory during development. “I never worked on development before in my life until I started my lab,” he explains, “but I had an idea to work on memory and development.” The funding led directly to a 2023 paper in Science Advances on infant memory, since followed by programmatic funding from Research Ireland and, most recently, discoveries about embodied memory: how infection and inflammation form contextual memories can trigger pre-emptive immune and metabolic responses. For Tomás, though, the Fellowship’s deepest value has been the community itself, which he describes as a genuine, inclusive network of excellence which he contrasts with more typical friendship- and politics-based networks he dominate much of academia.

Watching younger Fellows fly at annual meetings, he adds, has been a source of inspiration rather than competition, reinforced by a rare quality: longevity of connection across generations of scientists. As he puts it, brains “are not built, brains are grown gradually,” a conviction that not only shapes his current research, but also his commitment to contribute to the Lister community long-term.