Professor Andrew Filby is the first UK-based technical specialist to be appointed as a Professor of Practice; a paradigm shift in how non-academic technical staff are recognised and rewarded for their contributions to research and teaching.
He is currently the academic director of the Cytometry and Single Cell platform at Newcastle University in the UK and leads one of the crosscutting research themes within the Faculty of Medical Sciences focused on “Innovation, Methodology and Application” (IMA). Professor Filby also serves on the directorate of the Newcastle University Centre of Excellence (NUCoRE) in Biomedical Engineering. He specialises in single cell technologies and their applications in human development, health and disease. He is also a former International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) council member and former “Shared Resource Laboratory Emerging Leader”.
In 2019, Professor Filby was the recipient of the Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) medal for Flow Cytometry-based research and in 2021 he was awarded the accolade of “Outstanding technician of the Year” by the Times Higher Education magazine; the “Oscars” of UK Higher education.
He has worked with flow cytometry for over 20 years and obtained his PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) registered to University College London (UCL) in Molecular and Cellular Immunology. He has worked in academic roles, industrial roles (both commercial and pharmaceutical) as well as in the shared resource laboratory (SRL) environment. He has maintained a very active research and method development programme while working in the SRL environment and writes and secures his own competitive grant funding. He publishes his methodological developments and collaborative studies in several high impact journals and is a member of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) initiative. He serves on two of the largest UK-based funding panels for enabling technologies (MRC and BBSRC), playing a key role in developing funding policies for multi-user equipment and more recently co-chairs the Technical Council as part of the new Research England-funded Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy (UK-ITSS).