Bertie Göttgens graduated from Tübingen University in 1992 with a degree in biochemistry and received his DPhil in biological sciences from the University of Oxford in 1994. He then moved to the University of Cambridge Department of Haematology for postdoc training from 1994 to 2003 before becoming a Leukaemia Research Fund Lecturer and then a University Lecturer (2003-2007). He was appointed Reader in Molecular Haematology in 2007 and since 2011 has been the University of Cambridge Professor of Molecular Haematology. In 2019 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Wellcome – MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Amongst other appointments he is an Associate Editor of Blood and a former president of the International Society of Experimental Hematology. He is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a member of EMBO.

Bertie uses a combination of experimental and computational approaches to study how transcription factor networks control the function of blood stem cells and how mutations that perturb such networks cause leukaemia. This integrated approach has resulted in the discovery of new combinatorial interactions between key blood stem cell regulators, as well as experimentally validated computational models for blood stem cells. Current research focuses on (i) single cell genomics of early blood development, (ii) modelling the transcriptional landscape of blood stem and progenitor cell differentiation, (iii) transcriptional consequences of leukaemogenic mutations in leukaemia stem/progenitor cells, and (iv) molecular characterisation of human blood stem/progenitor cell populations used in cell and gene therapy protocols.