Frank Grosveld

Who is Frank Grosveld?

Franklin Gerardus "Frank" Grosveld FRS is a Dutch molecular biologist whose research interests are in the regulation of transcription during development with a particular emphasis on mammalian erythroid differentiation. He obtained his PhD at McGill University, Montreal and after completing two postdoctoral periods with Charles Weissmann and Richard Flavell he started his own research group at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill. He is a professor and Head of the Department of Cell Biology at the Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Grosveld has been conducting research on the regulation of gene expression over thirty years. In his post-doctoral research he constructed the first reliable method for cloning human DNA cosmids - at the time an extremely difficult but rewarding accomplishment that has since been adopted by many other laboratories. By using the globin gene cluster he made the ground-breaking discovery of a locus control region located upstream of the gene itself and governing overall control of globin gene expression.