Roli Roberts

Associate Editor (U.K.)

Although brought up in Zambia, where he was home-schooled in the remote town of Mulobezi, Roli returned to the UK at the age of 11. He studied biochemistry at Oxford and did his PhD on the genetics of muscular dystrophy at Guy’s Hospital, London, with David Bentley and Martin Bobrow. After a post-doctoral fellowship with Morgan Sheng in Boston he returned to the UK as lecturer and then senior lecturer at King’s College London. Here he used phylogenetic and comparative sequence analysis to generate hypotheses about the function of genes and proteins implicated in various human genetic diseases. In 2011, after an assessment of what he did and did not like about his academic job, he decided that more satisfaction might be gained from a life in science publishing. PLoS Biology, with its combination of breadth of topic and open access ethic, seemed particularly attractive.