Professor Anne Willis graduated with a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Kent and obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of London while working in the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratories (now CRUK) on DNA repair with Dr Tomas Lindahl.  She then moved to Cambridge to work with Professor Richard Perham in the Department of Biochemistry, where she also held a Junior Research Fellowship and then a College Lectureship at Churchill College Cambridge.  Anne was appointed to a lectureship in Biochemistry at University of Leicester in 1992. In 2004, she was appointed Director of Cancer Research Nottingham and Chair of Cancer Cell Biology. In 2010 Anne became Director of the MRC Toxicology Unit and in 2018 was appointed Professor of Toxicology at Cambridge University Cambridge to coincide with the Unit’s transfer to the University.  Anne’s research in the Unit is directed towards understanding the role of post-transcriptional control in response to toxic injury with a focus on RNA-binding proteins, regulatory RNA motifs and therapeutic RNAs. Anne was appointed as member of EMBO in 2014, awarded an OBE for services to biomedical sciences in 2015, and appointed Fellow of the British Toxicology Society in 2018.