FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Owen Rackham Event

Time:

3:30pm

Date:

2026-06-10 15:30:00

Venue:

University of Southampton, Centenary Building (100), University Road, Southampton, SO17 1BJ

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Event details

This is the sixth Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in our 2025-26 series that celebrates the careers of our newly appointed Professors. On Wednesday 10th June 2026, Professor Owen Rackham from the School of Biological Sciences and Professor Lyn Ellett from the School of Psychology will present their research. Details of both lectures are available via the booking link.

Professor Owen Rackham

Learning the Rules of Life: Using Data to Map, Model and Shape the Cells That Build Us

Cells are extraordinary systems, capable of sensing their environment, regulating themselves, communicating with their neighbours and working together to build and maintain the human body. Their ability to organise during development, and to continue adapting throughout life, is one of the great wonders of biology. The same control systems that guide healthy growth and repair can, under pressure from the environment or subtle molecular changes, drift away from their intended paths. This can lead cells towards disease, but it also highlights how responsive and malleable cellular systems truly are. My research aims to uncover the rules that govern cell identity and behaviour, and to use this understanding to reprogramme cells, restore failing functions and open new possibilities for discovery and therapy. By bringing together large biological datasets and advanced AI, my goal is to help shift bioscience from observation towards engineering. This lecture will trace this journey, from fundamental insights to translational impact for patients.

Biography

Owen Rackham is Professor of AI for the Life Sciences at the University of Southampton, where he leads the Data Driven Biology group. He completed his PhD in complexity sciences at the University of Bristol in 2012 and then joined Imperial College London as an MRC Career Development Fellow. In 2015 he moved to Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore to establish his first research group, before returning to the United Kingdom in 2022. He also founded and served as the initial Chief Technology Officer of Mogrify, a data driven cell and gene therapy company based in Cambridge.

His research focuses on what defines human cells and how their phenotype emerges from the interactions between the genome, the transcriptome and the environment. His group combines experimental and computational approaches to create tools that reveal how cells make decisions and how these decisions can be engineered. He is the lead for advanced analytics in the CRUK CD3 cancer early detection programme and has served as a Turing Fellow and as the Theme Lead for Cell and Molecular Medicine at the Alan Turing Institute. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His work has received several awards, including the BBSRC Pioneer Award and the Public Service Award from the International Society for Stem Cell Research.