Rate My Professor Kirsty Wan

Professor Kirsty Wan holds the position of Professor of Cellular and Biophysical Dynamics at the Living Systems Institute (LSI) and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Exeter. She completed her BA and MMath degrees in Mathematics in 2010 and her PhD in Biological Physics in 2014 at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Raymond E. Goldstein FRS. From 2014 to 2017, she conducted postdoctoral research in the Goldstein laboratory at Cambridge, supported by the Thomas Nevile Junior Research Fellowship from Magdalene College. Since joining the University of Exeter in 2017, she has advanced through positions at the LSI: Research Fellow (2017-2019), Senior Research Fellow (2019-2023), Associate Professor (2023-2025), and Professor since 2025. She also serves as Director of Global Engagement at the LSI.

Professor Wan's research investigates the biophysical principles of motile behaviours in microorganisms, emphasizing the dynamics, coordination, and control of motile cilia and flagella at the interface of physics, mathematics, and biology. Her group employs high-speed quantitative imaging, genetics, cell biology, theoretical and computational modelling, and robophysics to study self-propulsion gaits, metachronal waves, bioelectric locomotion control, and the origins of eukaryotic excitability in protists and invertebrate larvae. She has secured major competitive funding, including an ERC Starting Grant in 2019 for sensory-motor pathways in unicellular organisms, a £500,000 ARIA grant in 2023 for embodied cognition in single-celled organisms, and leadership of the nearly £5 million Wellcome Discovery Award-funded UNICIL project in 2025, uniting six European research groups to decode multiciliary functions. Key publications include "Flagellar synchronization through direct hydrodynamic interactions" (eLife, 2014), "Coordinated beating of algal flagella is mediated by basal coupling" (PNAS, 2016), and "Origins of eukaryotic excitability" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2021). Her work, with substantial citations, advances microscale motility understanding and informs ciliopathy research.