Michael Stark
I trained in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Leicester in the UK, working on bacterial ribosome function and continuing this theme through a postdoctoral position with Albert Dahlberg at Brown University in the USA. I began working with yeast in 1983 at the Leicester Biocentre (Leicester University), moving to Dundee to set up my own group in 1987 and establishing a number of projects in the area of budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cell growth and division. These included identifying and characterising an essential role of calmodulin at the yeast spindle pole body (SPB) and investigating the roles and regulation of yeast protein phosphatases, principally PP1 and PP2A. My recent work has focussed on the role of Ipl1p (Aurora B) kinase in the regulation of yeast kinetochore function and in the spindle checkpoint and on the regulation of Elongator, a protein complex required for tRNA wobble uridine modification in eukaryotes.