9 September 2024
This year’s winner of the LEO Foundation Award in Region EMEA, Dr. Claire Higgins, has all the qualities of an outstanding, young skin scientist. Her research aims to achieve scarless wound healing in human skin by studying the human hair follicle and understanding how it can be used as a model for skin healing.
Dr. Claire Higgins, a Reader in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London in the UK, is the winner of the LEO Foundation Award in Region EMEA. Claire Higgins receives the award – worth USD 100,000 – in support of her impressive academic achievements and her remarkable leadership within her research group and to future generations of skin scientists.
“It is a pleasure to present this year’s LEO Foundation Award in Region EMEA to Claire Higgins, a truly well-deserving recipient of the award. Claire Higgins is a distinguished and talented skin scientist. Her substantial impact on skin research extends beyond her research to the colleagues and students whom she works with and trains. Claire Higgins’s clear vision for her future research can help to pave the way for new and exciting discoveries within dermatology, pointing to improve the lives of people living with skin diseases,” says Anne-Marie Engel, Chief Scientific Officer at the LEO Foundation.
Claire Higgins received the USD 100,000 award in person during the 53rd Annual ESDR Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal on 5 September 2024.
“I am thrilled to receive the LEO Foundation Award. I find my research super exciting, and I love discovering new things about the skin, but receiving this award reinforces the belief that our work is interesting and has the potential to have several impacts on skin health,” says Claire Higgins.
Decoding the mechanism of hair follicles
Claire Higgins is a remarkable talent and has demonstrated an impressive track record of providing advances to our understanding of the skin – her work has led to significant insights into hair follicle biology and its potential therapeutic applications. The overarching goal of Claire Higgins’s research is to achieve scarless wound healing in human skin by preventing and reversing fibrosis which has occurred either because of injury or disease. To do so she is studying the human hair follicle to understand how it can be used as a model system for scarless healing.
Claire Higgins leads Higgins ‘Skin Regeneration’ Lab at the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London as the Principal Investigator. Her group is diverse and currently contains two postdocs, one research assistant and six PhD students and the research projects of the group range from diagnostics for scleroderma – which leads to chronic hardening and contraction of skin and in some cases also connective tissue in other parts of the body – to evolution of hair.
The LEO Foundation Award aims to advance our understanding and treatment of skin diseases by recognizing and encouraging promising young talents, hoping to provide a boost to their future careers and by doing so, contributing to the pipeline of excellent dermatology researchers worldwide.
In this Q&A, Claire Higgins talks about her academic focus and her fascination with skin.
About Dr. Claire Higgins
- 2022-present: Reader, Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, UK
- 2018-2022: Senior Lecturer, Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, UK
- 2014-2018: Lecturer, Department of Bioengineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, UK
- 2010-2013: Associate Research Scientist, Department of Dermatology, Columbia University, New York, USA
- 2007-2010: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Dermatology, Columbia University, New York, USA
- 2007: PhD, University of Durham, UK
About the award
The LEO Foundation Award – worth USD 100,000 – recognizes outstanding young researchers and scientists from around the world whose work represents an extraordinary contribution to skin research and has the potential to pave the way for new and improved treatments for skin diseases.
The award is given three times annually, one in each of the three regions: the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. It is granted in open competition with all award applications being evaluated by an independent and international Global Review Panel. The panel members are appointed annually by their respective dermatology societies in the three regions.