Professor Anne Ridley was born in 1963, and educated at Cambridge (BA Hons, Biochemistry 1985) including her PhD (ICRF, London 1989 with Hartmut Land). She pursued postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute, MIT and Institute for Cancer Research with Alan Hall, where she worked on Rho family GTPases. She became a research group leader at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UCL in 1993 and was promoted to Professor of Cell Biology at UCL in 2003. She moved to the Randall Division, KCL (2007-2016) before becoming Head of School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine University of Bristol (2016-). Her research has increased understanding of cancer, tumour progression and inflammation through her work on cell migration. She is President of the British Society for Cell Biology.