Cait MacPhee

Catherine Elizabeth "Cait" MacPhee CBE FRSE FInstP FRSC is Professor of Biological Physics at the University of Edinburgh.[1] After studying for her BSc in biochemistry and her PhD in medicine at the University of Melbourne she moved to the University of Oxford for postdoctoral research, where she was a research fellow at St Hilda's College, and subsequently held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. From 2001-2005 she was a Royal Society University Fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and held a research fellowship at Girton College and then a fellowship at King's College. In 2006 she moved to the University of Edinburgh, where she became Professor of Biological Physics in 2011.[2]

MacPhee's research into the BslA protein from Bacillus subtilis, together with Nicola Stanley-Wall from the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, has been widely reported because of potential applications in the production of ice cream.[3][4][5] She was appointed CBE in the 2016 New Year Honours "for services to women in physics",[6] and was subsequently elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[7] In 2016 she was selected as a finalist for the BBSRC Innovator of the Year competition.[8] In 2018 she was awarded the Gabor Medal of the Royal Society.[9]