Rate My Professor Ilan Davis

Professor Ilan Davis holds the position of Professor of Spatial Molecular Biology in the School of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Glasgow, where he also serves as an Affiliate Professor in the School of Infection & Immunity. He obtained his Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge University and his DPhil from the ICRF Developmental Biology Unit at Oxford University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF in San Francisco. In 1996, he established his laboratory at the University of Edinburgh as a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow and was promoted to professor in 2003. He relocated to the University of Oxford in 2007 as Professor of Cell Biology and Wellcome Senior Research Fellow, continuing there until 2023 before joining Glasgow.

Davis's research specializes in Drosophila neuroscience, viruses and RNA biology, and the development of microscope technologies. His lab has elucidated key mechanisms in post-transcriptional regulation, including Dynein-mediated mRNA transport along microtubules in Drosophila, mRNA anchoring by molecular motors, phase-separated processing bodies that triage mRNA fate, mRNA stability regulating neural stem cell division, and localized translation underlying synaptic plasticity. The group pioneers advanced microscopy techniques, image analysis software such as Python Microscope Cockpit, and computational approaches, applying these to detect mRNA viruses with high sensitivity. Notable publications include "Incorporation of genome-bound cellular proteins into HIV-1 particles regulates viral infection" (Cell Reports, 2026), "Deep3DSIM: super-resolution imaging of thick tissue using 3D structured illumination with adaptive optics" (eLife, 2025), "Imp/IGF2BP and Syp/SYNCRIP temporal RNA regulons drive compartmentalised translation during oogenesis" (Science Advances, 2025), and "Super-resolution single molecule FISH at the Drosophila neuromuscular junction" (2018). He was elected a member of EMBO in 2010 and has received multiple Wellcome Trust fellowships and grants, including recent BBSRC and NIH funding for spatial transcriptomics and ALS research.