Joyce Taylor-Papadimitriou was born in Burnley, Lancashire, in the UK. She obtained her first degree in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1954. She obtained her PhD with Lou Siminovitch at the University of Toronto. While a postdoc at NIMR in Alick Isaacs's lab she was the first to demonstrate that the action of type 1 interferons requires the synthesis of effector proteins. From NIMR she moved to Greece and worked there for eight years. She then returned to London and set up her lab at ICRF (now the CR-UK London Research Institute). Since 1997 she has been head of the CR-UK Breast Cancer Biology Group based at Guy's Hospital.
Joyce's major research interest has been the phenotype of breast cancers in the context of normal mammary epithelium. She identified and characterised a tumour associated antigen (the MUC1 membrane mucin) which is over expressed and aberrantly glycosylated in breast...
