SURE

I am a developmental neurobiologist interested in how the brain develops and how this development has evolved over the last 500 or so million years. I teach embryology, neuroanatomy, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology across the medical curriculum. After reading Cell Biology at Durham, my PhD explored the evolution of the homeobox genes in animals, which are crucial in building animal embryos, under the supervision of Dr David Ferrier (now in St Andrews) and Prof Peter Holland at Oxford, where I was also a college lecturer at St Catherine's College. From there, I moved to work as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof Richard Wingate, Prof Andrew Lumsden, and Prof Anthony Graham at King's College London on the development and evolution of the hindbrain. It was at KCL that I began using experimental chick embryology to address questions of brain development, something I have been engaged in ever since. My first teaching post was as a lecturer in neurobiology on the Nanchang Joint Programme at QMUL, and before moving to Sunderland I was the programme director for the BSc Anatomy degree at the University of Liverpool.