Fiona is a Reader in Developmental Biology. Her research focuses on transcriptional regulation in early embryonic development and disease. She teaches on various Developmental Biology courses in the School of Bioscience Education, is the Academic Lead for the Bioscience Peer Assisted Learning Scheme, and from 2018-22 she was Director of the Health Sciences Doctoral Training Centre.

Fiona’s interest in development biology was sparked as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge by scientists such as Professor Sir John Gurdon, in whose lab she worked as a summer intern. She obtained her PhD in Developmental Biology from University College London, where she worked in the lab of Professor Leslie Dale, studying the regulation of BMP signalling during mesoderm formation. Her postdoctoral work took her the lab of Professor Hazel Sive at the Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she investigated the regulation of anterior gene expression in Xenopus, and then to the lab of Professor Jim Smith at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge. Here she continued to study early development in Xenopus, and initiated a project using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) combined with genomic microarrays in zebrafish to study the gene regulation in embryonic development. Fiona then secured an MRC Career Development Award and Lister Institute Research Prize and moved to the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge to establish her lab, before moving to the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics at King’s College London in 2010.

See our Projects page for more information on the lab’s current research.