Magdalena Skipper is a British geneticist and the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature.^[2] She previously served as an editor of Nature Reviews Genetics^[3][4] and the open access journal Nature Communications.

Skipper obtained a bachelor's degree in genetics at the University of Nottingham.^[5][6] She completed her PhD in 1998 at the University of Cambridge, where she worked in Jonathan Hodgkin's lab investigating sex-determination systems in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.^[1][7] She is a member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.^[8]

After completing her PhD she joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge.^[9][7] She briefly worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, working on the notch signaling pathway of zebrafish in gut development.^[7][10]

Skipper joined Nature in 2001 as an associate editor for Nature Reviews Genetics.^[7] During her editorship she interviewed several high-profile scientists including Anne McLaren,^[11] Mario Capecchi^[12] and Oliver Smithies.^[13] In 2002 she was appointed chief editor of Nature Reviews Genetics, and was promoted to associate publisher in 2008.^[14][15] She serves on the advisory board of the Centre for Personalised Medicine at the University of Oxford.^[16] Skipper worked briefly as Director for Scientific Communications at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Seattle.^[5][8]

In 2018 she worked with Nature and Estée Lauder Companies to launch a global award for women in science.^[17][18] She became the first woman editor-in-chief of Nature in its 150-year history in May 2018, when she succeeded Philip Campbell.^[19][20][2] She has stated that she intends to ensure that science is reproducible and robust, as well as doing more to support early-career researchers.^[19]