Prof Nick Barker is currently a Research Director at A*STAR IMCB, Singapore, an adjunct Professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and a Visiting Professor at Kanazawa University, Japan

Nick Barker obtained his PhD from Reading University, UK in 1996. Together with Professor Hans Clevers, he identified dysregulated Wnt signalling as the initiating event in colon cancer. In 2001, he joined Semaia Pharmaceuticals to develop colon cancer therapeutics, then returned to Hans Clevers’ group as a Senior Staff Scientist in 2006, where he identified Lgr5 as a marker of various adult stem cell populations and intestinal Lgr5 stem cells as a cell-of-origin of colon cancer. Moving to Singapore in 2010, he joined A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) as a Senior Principal Investigator and now holds the position of Research Director at the A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB). His research focuses on Lgr5+ gastric stem cells in tissue homeostasis and cancer. In 2017, he received the prestigious NRF Investigatorship and has been recognized as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2019 with over 35,000 citations. In 2022, he was elected to EMBO as an Associate Member and was awarded the Japanese Cancer Association International prize for cancer research.