Cecilia Lai is a Daphne Jackson Fellow at Queen Mary University of London in the Centre for Endocrinology, William Harvey Research Institute.

Cecilia grew up in Hong Kong and gained a scholarship to study a degree in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. Subsequently she worked as a Research Assistant in parallel with studying for a DPhil at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. During her DPhil, Cecilia was instrumental in identifying the first gene implicated in individuals with an inherited speech and language disorder (FOXP2),  which led to a first-authored paper in Nature (2001).

Following her DPhil, Cecilia completed two Post-Doctoral Fellowships at University College London and Queen Mary University of London working on molecular mechanisms of lung cancer, colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, respectively. As a senior postdoc, Cecilia also worked on ethics and grants applications, teaching, and peer reviewing articles.

Returning to research after a nine year career break Cecilia’s project is titled: Studying Genetic Predisposition Towards Obesity in Down Syndrome Using Polygenic Risk Scores

This 3 year Fellowship is sponsored by the Royal Society.