Alison joined the Boyle Lab in October 2017, after having a career break to spend time with her young children and to provide support for her elderly parents.

Prior to this, Alison worked with Dr Nancy Hogg at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (which is now part of the Frances Crick Institute) where her role as a Senior Scientific Officer involved both research and laboratory management. 

Alison joined the Hogg Lab after completing a degree in Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow. Her first research interest involved studying the interaction of the leukocyte integrin LFA-1 with its ligands ICAM-1 and ICAM-3, in collaboration with Drs Tony Berendt, Alister Craig and David Simmons (Oxford). During her PhD in the Hogg Lab she investigated the regulation of LFA-1 on T lymphocytes. She then had an exciting opportunity to collaborate with Drs David Inwald and Nigel Klein (Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, London) to characterise integrin dysfunction in a child with a novel form of leukocyte adhesion deficiency (LAD), later termed LAD-III. This work led Alison to investigate other patients with similar disease profiles and to be involved in the discovery that mutations in the focal adhesion protein Kindlin-3 are responsible for LAD-III.