Prof Nick Barker is currently a Research Director and Chief Operating Officer at A*STAR IMCB, Singapore and an adjunct Professor at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

Nick received his PhD from Reading University, UK in 1996. Together with Professor Hans Clevers, he identified dysregulated Wnt signaling 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 colon cancer origins. In 2010, he joined A*STAR’s Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) as a Senior Principal Investigator & is now a Research Director at the A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB). His research focuses on Lgr5+ & Aqp5+ stem cells in tissue homeostasis and cancer within the gastrointestinal tract. In 2017, he received the prestigious NRF Investigatorship and has been a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2019 with over 44,000 citations. In 2022, he was elected to EMBO as an Associate Member and was awarded the Japanese Cancer Association International prize for cancer research.