Saunders Genetics Lecture 2026

The Saunders Genetics Lecture will be held on Monday 09 March 2026, 4:30 - 5:30pm at the Babbage Lecture Theatre in the David Attenborough Building, New Museums Site, Cambridge.

This will be the fifth of a prestigious series of lectures held in commemoration of the life and work of Edith Rebecca (Becky) Saunders who made major contributions to the understanding of genetics and heredity at the beginning of the 20^th century. Saunders entered Newnham College in 1884, continued her postgraduate research as a Bathurst student from 1888 to 1889, and later became the director of the Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women in 1899. She was Director of Studies for Natural Sciences at Newnham between 1918 and 1925 and President of the Genetical Society from 1936-1938.


The Saunders Genetics Lectures celebrates the best contemporary research in Genetics today, with invited speakers being selected for their contribution to research which resonates with the activities of the Department of Genetics and across the School of Biological Sciences.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Titia de Lange as our speaker for the 2026 Saunders Lecture. The title of Dr de Lange's talk is “2 Billion years of shelterin and t-loops: from telomere protection to cancer prevention”.

Dr. Titia de Lange received training in molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of Amsterdam. As an undergraduate, she did research in Richard Flavell’s lab at the MRC in Mill Hill, UK. She was a graduate student in Piet Borst’s lab in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Amsterdam and moved with Borst to the Dutch Cancer Center where she first developed an interest in telomeres. After receiving her PhD in 1985, de Lange joined Harold Varmus at UCSF for postdoctoral studies. With Varmus, she isolated human telomeric DNA and was the first to show that human telomeres shorten during tumorigenesis. In 1990, she moved to the Rockefeller to take a position as a University Fellow and was appointed as Assistant Professor in 1991. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994 and to Professor in 1997. She currently is the Leon Hess Professor and the Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research at the Rockefeller University.

She is a member of EMBO, the US National Academy of Science, both Dutch Royal Academies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine. She is an foreign member of the Royal Society of London and received honorary degrees from the University of Utrecht, the University of Chicago, and the University of Groningen.

De Lange’s awards include the inaugural Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research in 2001, the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Prize, the Judd award from MSKCC, the AACR’s Charlotte Friend and G.H.A. Clowes Awards, the 2011 Vilcek Prize, the 2012 Vanderbilt Prize, the 2012 Dr. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2013, the 2014 Canada Gairdner International Award, the 2018 Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award, and the 2024 Pezcoller AACR International Award.

You can find out more about Saunders' history associated with the Department of Genetics here.