Kay Davies

Kay Davies MA DPhil FRS is a British human geneticist. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy in the University of Oxford. She is a fellow of Hertford College and, with Frances Ashcroft and Peter Donnelly is a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function.

Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In the 1980s she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of carrying DMD.

DMD occurs when the dystrophin protein fails to express in muscle cells due to a mutation in the gene which codes for the protein. In 1989 Professor Davies discovered that the utrophin protein has similar properties to dystrophin and has since shown in mouse models that up regulation of the former protein in muscle cells can compensate for the absence of latter.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. She is an Executive Editor of the journal Human Molecular Genetics.