Jake Cornwall Scoones, PhD student in the Developmental Dynamics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, has been awarded a prestigious Schmidt Science Fellowship to support his research into how cells behave when body size is altered.
Jake Cornwall Scoones
Jake Cornwall Scoones
Schmidt Science Fellowships are awarded to emerging scientists who have completed a PhD in natural sciences, computing, engineering or mathematics. The fellowships fund them to work in a field different from their existing expertise through a postdoctoral placement.
Jake joins 32 successful awardees this year, who represent 15 nationalities and are working on a range of problems from cancer treatment to quantum technologies to sustainability.
Finding the rule book for size-control
In his fellowship, Jake will pivot from specifically looking at molecules and cells to studying systems happening in the body. He will aim to measure how cells change their behaviour when body size is perturbed and to find the signals driving this regulation.
Potentially providing us with the rule book for how the body and its organs control their size for the first time, Jake’s work could have implications for controlling tissue growth in cancer or biomanufacturing human-sized organs ready to transplant.
Jake said: “I am thrilled to have been selected as a 2025 Schmidt Science Fellow. Working on principles of gene regulation during my PhD, I look forward to pivoting up several levels of biological organisation in my postdoctoral work to investigate how organs and organisms regulate their sizes.”
James Briscoe, Group Leader of the Developmental Dynamics Laboratory at the Crick, said: “Jake's exceptional talent for merging theoretical frameworks with experimental biology has been evident throughout his PhD. His ability to think across different scales of biological organisation makes him perfectly suited for this fellowship. It is richly deserved. I'm confident that Jake's interdisciplinary approach will yield fundamental insights that bridge molecular processes to whole-organism physiology.”