David Strutt

Professor David Strutt is a Wellcome Senior Research Professor and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science at the School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield. He holds a PhD and BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on understanding mechanisms of coordinated cell polarity during animal development, particularly in Drosophila melanogaster, investigating planar polarity pathways such as the Frizzled-dependent and Fat/Dachsous systems. His work integrates molecular genetics, live imaging, super-resolution microscopy, and computational modeling to study how cells coordinate polarity across tissues. Key contributions include elucidating roles of proteins like Prickle, Dishevelled, and Casein Kinase Iε in signalosome formation and asymmetric localization. Strutt leads grants including a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship and a joint UKRI/Wellcome Trust project on self-organised tissue patterning. He teaches Advanced Developmental Biology and serves on committees for the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance and the Human Frontiers Science Program. His lab develops tools like QuantifyPolarity for analyzing planar polarity dynamics, bridging experimental and theoretical approaches to understand morphogenesis.