Bill received the medal for its pioneering contributions to the understanding of neural system development and his work on behalf of local research communities
William Harris, FRS FMedSci, is the 2017 Waddington Medallist.
The Waddington medal is awarded by the British Society of the Developmental Biology for outstanding research performance as well as services to the subject. Bill received the prize on the 3rd of April 2017 during the BSDB Spring Meeting in Warwick. The Waddington Medal is dedicated to the memory of Conrad Waddington, influential British embryologist and geneticist active between the '30s and the '60s.
Bill received the medal for its pioneering contributions to the understanding of neural system development and his work on behalf of local research communities. His and laboratory colleagues’ discoveries helped establish many of the basic principles underlying axon guidance in brain wiring. His recent research focuses on how the brain tissues grow to the appropriate size with the right number of all the different cells types. He uses zebrafish embryos to do this work, because they are optically transparent, and with transgenic lines, such as the Spectrum of Fate lines in which all the cell types express unique combinations of differently coloured fluorescent proteins and recent innovation in advanced fluorescence microscopy. His team have made the first four dimensional movies of cells dividing and differentiating into neurons.
Bill moved to Cambridge from San Diego in 1997 as Professor of Anatomy and has served as head of that Department as well as the Department of Physiology, Development since it was formed from the merger of Anatomy and Physiology in 2006. Bill has also served as co-chair of Cambridge Neuroscience, an Interdisciplinary Research Centre, and heads the Cambridge Advance Imaging Centre (CAIC) a network and hub that draw together and provides the most advanced microscopic imaging activity across the University. Finally, Bill is a coach for the Cambridge University team and has made it his goal in life to bring an ice rink to Cambridge. It should open in 2018, the year Bill retires.