Dr Mike Tomlinson grew up in Birmingham before studying as an undergraduate at the University of Bath. Mike was one of the founders of the tetraspanin field during his PhD at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford, supervised by immunologists Neil Barclay and Mark Wright. Between 1996 and 2003 he did post-doctoral work in two leading lymphocyte cell signalling groups in the USA, run by Joe Bolen at DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, and by Art Weiss at the University of California, San Francisco.
In 2004 he moved back to the UK to join the platelet research group of Steve Watson in the Institute of Biomedical Research at the University of Birmingham. Mike started his own research group in 2005 through a MRC New Investigator Award Fellowship to study tetraspanin regulation of platelet receptors. In 2009 he obtained a British Heart Foundation Senior Fellowship to expand his tetraspanin research to endothelial cells, and moved across campus to the School of Biosciences.
Mike became a Senior Lecturer in 2014 and his research group is funded by grants from the British Heart Foundation, BBSRC, European Research Council, Birmingham-Maastricht PhD Programme and MRC Harwell. His current work aims to capitalise on the growing potential of tetraspanins as drug targets in a variety of disease processes.