Queen Mary researchers among top 100 in UK

Three of the four - Professor Frances Balkwill, Professor Irene Leigh, and Professor Claudia Langenberg - all female scientist from the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, have been named Best Female Scientists for the fourth consecutive year. Prof Langenberg is featured in top seven.  

Their groundbreaking work spans cancer biology and genomics through to public health and clinical innovation, reflecting the university's commitment to advancing healthcare and improving lives. 

The researchers have been featured on the list every year since its creation in 2022. The aim of the ranking is to “inspire female scholars, women pondering an academic career, as well as decision-makers worldwide with the example of successful women in the scientific community.” 

Speaking as a group, Professor Langenberg, Professor Balkwill and Professor Leigh said: “It is humbling to see our names among so many wonderful and inspiring colleagues. Our ambition is to support the next generation of outstanding female scientists to diversify our talent pool at Queen Mary and beyond. The time is now!”  

Joining them on the list this year is Dr Yongxin Yang from the Faculty of Science and Engineering who has been named Rising Star of Science, recognised for his work in machine learning and its applications in finance and medical genetics. 

Dr Yang said: "I am honoured to be recognised by Research.com as Rising Star of Science 2025. My top priority has always been to conduct research that makes a real-world impact, and this recognition motivates me to continue pursuing meaningful research."   

Frances Balkwill, Professor of Cancer Biology at Barts Cancer Institute   

Fran is Professor of Cancer Biology and Deputy Centre Lead for the Centre for Tumour Microenvironment at Queen Mary’s Barts Cancer Institute. She studies the tumour microenvironment, the dynamic mix of malignant and immune cells, blood vessels and other ostensibly normal cells found in most cancers. She is a pioneer of research into cancer-related inflammation and the tumour microenvironment and has made paradigm-shifting discoveries on the role of cytokines in cancer promotion that led to clinical trials. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2024.  

Fran is also a leader in public engagement in science. In her early career, when her children asked what she did for a living, she went to look for children’s books about cells that she could read to her children. She couldn’t find any, so wrote them herself. She has now written twelve and edited a further six children’s science books with graphic designer Mic Rolph. Approximately 500,000 books have been printed with ten foreign editions. She received the 2006 Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize, an annual award that recognises a scientist or engineer whose expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms is exemplary.  

She is Director of the Centre of the Cell, a biomedical science centre for children, educational website, and widening participation and outreach project in Whitechapel. It is the first science education centre in the world to be located within working biomedical research laboratories. The Centre has had over 250,000 visitors since its opening in 2009.    

Claudia Langenberg, Director of the Precision Health University Research Institute (PHURI)  

Claudia is a German-British scientist and the Director of the Precision Health University Research Institute (PUHRI), a cross-faculty institute that works closely with Barts Health NHS Trust to research and develop innovations in precision healthcare. She was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in July 2024.  

A public health clinician by training, her research is focused on the genetic basis of metabolic control, and her team studies its effects on health through integration of detailed molecular with large-scale clinical data.    

Before joining Queen Mary in September 2022, Claudia was Professor of Computational Medicine at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité University Medicine, Germany, where she continuous to hold a part-time role and team, and MRC Investigator and Programme Leader at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK.    

 Irene Leigh, Professor of Cell and Molecular Medicine at the Institute of Dentistry   

Irene’s research has focused on non-melanoma skin cancers and genetic skin diseases. Early in her career, she established the Centre for Cutaneous Research at the London Hospital Medical College, which later became part of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. The Centre became a world leader in skin biology research.    

Irene directed the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) skin tumour laboratory from 1989-2017. She returned to Queen Mary in 2018 as the Interim Dean for Dentistry and then served as International Dean until 2021 when she served as Interim VP Health.    

Irene’s research focuses on cutaneous squamous cell carcinogenesis particularly genomic and transcriptomic analysis. This has extended to other squamous cancers in a Centre of Excellence for Squamous Cancer being established within the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry.    

Irene is a Fellow of the Academy Medical Science and Fellow of Royal Society Edinburgh. In 2006, she was honoured with an OBE for services to medicine and then a CBE in 2012.  

Dr Yongxin Yang, Lecturer in Financial Technology 

Yongxin is a Lecturer in Financial Technology at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was a Lecturer in Machine Learning at University of Surrey. His research is in the area of machine learning (transfer learning, domain generalization, and meta learning) and its applications in finance (portfolio optimization and derivatives pricing) and medical science (medical genetics and fairness in medical AI).  

His work has an h-index of 51, an i-index of 83, and has been cited in more than 22,000 publications based on Google Scholar. He has been listed in Stanford/Elsevier's top 2% scientist ranking since 2022. He has served as an associate editor for Intelligent Medicine, and an area chair in AAAI, ICLR, and CoLLAs. He is the co-founder of  Ekitech, a cloud infrastructure provider for medical data analysis.