Laura Marie Machesky FRSE FMedSci (born 13 August 1965) is a British-American cancer research scientist.
She moved to Cambridge University in 2022 as Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry.
She discovered the 7-subunit Arp2/3 complex and showed that this was a major regulator of actin dynamics and cell migration.
According to the Academy of Medical Sciences, this work "changed the way the field understood fundamental principles of signalling to actin dynamics and impacted on biomedical problems such as host-pathogen interactions, endocytic trafficking, phagocytosis and cancer cell invasion".
[4] Her husband Robert Insall is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a professor at the University of Glasgow.