Pauline Schaap

Pauline Schaap is a Dutch cell biologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a professor of Developmental Signalling at the University of Dundee.,^[1] a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

She studies the evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation in social amoebae.^[2]

Biography

Schaap received her PhD in 1987 from the University of Leiden.^[3] She was a professor at the University of Leiden until 1999, when she moved to the University of Dundee^[4] where she is currently a professor.^[1] She became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.^[4][5]

Professional contributions

Schaap and her collaborators established the first molecular phylogeny of the Dictyostelia.^[6] That work showed that complex multicellular fruiting bodies had evolved multiple times independently, contrary to what had previously been generally thought.^[6] More recently, Schaap and her team showed that the molecular pathway for multicellular development in dictyostelids had evolved from an ancestral encystment pathway present in single-celled amoebae,^[7][8][9] thus contributing to elucidating the molecular basis for the evolution of multicellularity ^[10]