Caroline Dive

Dive was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2020, a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2012 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015.

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 New Year Honours for her services to cancer research.

In April 2017, Dive's lab was amongst the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute labs severely damaged by the fire at the Christie Hospital.

Dive says the most important work she's published so far was in 2014, which she said was "a real step change for small cell lung cancer research." They showed that it's possible to take tumour cells that are circulating in a patient's blood and grow them to form tumours in the lab in mice. It was the first time a small cell lung tumour has been grown in this way and didn't require an invasive biopsy. This work allows the team to study lung cancer biology and test new treatments. The work was published in Nature Medicine.

Dive was awarded the Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize in 2012 and the AstraZeneca Prize for Women in Pharmacology in 2016. In 2020, she became the first recipient of the Johann Anton Merck Award in honour of her outstanding preclinical research in oncology.

She set up the Clinical Pharmacology Fellowship scheme in 2005 and has been training clinical fellows in the lab ever since.

After completing her PhD, Caroline set up her own group at Aston University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Birmingham, studying the mechanisms of drug induced tumour cell death. She then moved to what became the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester and was awarded a Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine Research Fellowship before moving to the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute in 2003.

Dive was educated at the University of London, where she awarded a First Class Honours Bachelor of Pharmacy in 1984. She went on to complete her postgraduate degree in Experimental Cancer Chemotherapy at the MRC Clinical Oncology and Radiotherapeutic Unit in Cambridge.

Caroline Dive CBE (born April 1962) is a British cancer research scientist. Dive is Professor of Cancer Pharmacology at the University of Manchester, Deputy Director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Manchester Institute, Director of the CRUK Manchester Institute Cancer Biomarker Centre and co-director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence. She is the current President of The European Association for Cancer Research (EACR).