Born in Bollington, Cheshire in 1979 Chrissy L. Hammond went to Tytherington High School and the University of Oxford (MBiochem 2002), before doing her PhD in the Randall (2006, with Simon Hughes) where she discovered how muscle stem cells arise in zebrafish and contribute to muscle growth. During postdoctoral work in the RVC with Neil Stickland and then in Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht with Stefan Schuelte-Merker she began studies on bone development. She returned to the UK as an Arthritis UK Research Fellow at the University of Bristol where she is now an Associate Professor in Developmental Genetics in the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience and uses zebrafish to unpick how skeletal diseases in people develop and progress.