It is a huge pleasure to nominate Professor Helen Skaer for the BSDB Waddington medal. She is a tireless advocate for our community, and has been teaching, inspiring and supporting developmental biologists for over 50 years. Throughout her career, Helen has been fascinated with understanding how cells are organised/organise themselves to produce physiologically functional organs. Her work unravelling the coordination between diverse cellular behaviours such as cell division, specification, differentiation and migration during morphogenesis has made major contributions to our understanding of organogenesis. Given her outstanding research, inspirational teaching, and her wide regard in the community, we believe she embodies the values the Waddington Medal aims to promote. We are confident that she will give a phenomenal Waddington lecture, that will serve to inspire the whole community.

Helen was one of the very first developmental biologists to tackle the relationship between form and function. During her PhD, Helen focused on understanding how excitable cells are resilient to environmental fluctuations in osmotic and ionic potential, giving her a grounding in cellular physiology. She then moved her focus to epithelial tissues – initially probing the relationship between their structure and their specific physiological attributes. During this phase of her work, she demonstrated that in invertebrates, which lack tight junctions, septate junctions can restrict paracellular flow and so contribute to epithelial tightness. She also pioneered technical developments in the low temperature preservation of material for freeze-fracture, leading to the vitrification of biological samples for electron microscopy.

Through this work, Helen became interested in the cellular activities that underlie the development of epithelial tissues; she set out to understand how intrinsic patterns of gene expression integrate with external signals to define specific cell behaviours. She decided to use the Malpighian (renal) tubules of Drosophila as a model tissue – realising that this system would enable her to combine cellular, genetic and molecular approaches with definable physiological readouts. This choice proved inspired: over the years she has dissected out the distinct cellular and molecular behaviours underlying the development of an epithelial tissue into a physiologically functional organ – pioneering ‘multi-scale’ developmental cell biology long before it became trendy!

Helen’s innovation and determination shine through in both her research and teaching successes. A standout example is from the late 80’s, when Helen demonstrated that the large cells at the tip of the developing renal tubules are mitogenically active, by dissecting open Drosophila embryos and ablating these single cells manually. As students, we loved to hear about Helen ablating renal tubule tip cells by sucking them up finely pulled capillary tubes – it inspired us to think outside the box and believe that anything was possible if you put your mind to it. Using genetic approaches, she then demonstrated that these cells are selected in the tubules by a combination of intrinsic factors and intercellular signalling; through the activity of the proneural transcription factors, whose patterns of expression are regulated by Wnt signalling and by Delta/Notch-mediated lateral inhibition. This was one of the early demonstrations that specific cell lineages outside the nervous system are specified by the refinement of proneural gene expression by lateral inhibition.

Over the years, the work of Helen and her lab has shed light on the regulation of features common to the architecture and function of all epithelia. Many of their findings have contributed to our understanding of vertebrate organogenesis, through their demonstration of conservation in regulatory pathways and networks, in their roles during nephrogenesis and more broadly in the development of tubular epithelia.

Helen has always combined research with an impressive range of teaching and outreach activities. Teaching undergraduate courses in Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield continuously since 1968, Helen designed and ran courses in developmental biology at all three institutions, including the first interdepartmental course in Oxford across the Biological Sciences/Medicine departments. She has trained over 50 summer vacation and final year students in her lab, many of whom have gone on to do PhDs and some of whom are now University academics teaching developmental/cell biology themselves (e.g. Tanya Whitfield, Keith Brennan, Peter Baumann). Finally, Helen plays a key role in promoting developmental biology in India, giving many talks to college students, and participating in both formal and informal collaborations in the NCBS in Bangalore. She has been a panel member for the India Alliance since its inception – a collaboration between the WT and Indian Department of Biotechnology, supporting and advising scientists across the community.

• Nicolas Tapon
• Kyra Campbell
• Tanya Whitfield
• David Strutt
• Marysia Placzek

I am writing to enthusiastically support Rory Maizels’s nomination for the Beddington Medal. His PhD work represents a remarkable achievement that advances our field’s long-standing goal: developing dynamical models that capture the full complexity of developmental systems. The central challenge in developmental biology is to understand how complex, multicellular tissues emerge from the coordinated actions of individual cells. While we have made great strides in identifying key molecular players and mapping gene regulatory networks, we still lack the ability to create predictive dynamical models that capture development in its full complexity. Rory’s work represents a critical step toward addressing this fundamental challenge. What sets Rory’s contribution apart is both its comprehensive scope and meticulous execution. Rather than pursuing flashy but superficial advances, he focused on building robust foundations – developing and rigorously validating new experimental and computational approaches that together enable dynamic modelling of development at scale. Remarkably, Rory personally drove every aspect of the project: from optimising molecular biology protocols and establishing automated laboratory workflows, to designing novel machine learning frameworks for analysing the resulting data. This rare combination of experimental and computational expertise allowed him to iterate between theory and practice in a uniquely effective way.

Prior to his PhD, Rory built a strong foundation through diverse research experience: molecular biology at LMCB UCL, developing computational tools for mitochondrial research at Oxford (resulting in an eLife publication), and completing the prestigious Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard in Computational Science and Engineering. It is important to emphasise that this fellowship was not simply a bioinformatics MSc but a computational course aimed at engineers and data scientists. This unique background prepared him perfectly for tackling the emerging challenges in single-cell genomics and developmental biology. At the Crick, he quickly demonstrated exceptional independence and scientific maturity, showing deep knowledge of the field while working autonomously and effectively communicating complex ideas to others.

In the first months in the lab (during the COVID pandemic), Rory led the computational analysis of a major single-cell RNA sequencing study of human neural development, analysing data from multiple stages of embryonic spinal cord tissue to identify distinct cell types and map differentiation pathways. His analysis not only revealed the diversity of neural cell types and their developmental trajectories but also provided important comparative insights between human and mouse development, demonstrating both his technical capabilities and his ability to collaborate effectively on complex projects. This work is published.

In his main PhD project, Rory developed novel experimental and computational methods. This delivered three major technical innovations that together advance our ability to study developmental dynamics. First, he developed sci-FATE2, an optimized and semi-automated protocol for metabolic labelling and single-cell RNA sequencing that matches commercial platforms in quality while being simpler to implement. This is published as a methods paper. Second, he created Velvet, a deep learning framework that improves upon existing methods for inferring cell state transitions from RNA data by integrating neighbourhood information into its velocity calculations. Finally, he extended this work with VelvetSDE, a cutting-edge neural stochastic differential equation system that can predict long-term cell fate trajectories and identify key decision points in development, while capturing the inherent variability in cellular decision-making. Applying this to data from the neural tube led to the realisation that expression of Shh modulators are crucial for differential signal interpretation and cell fate decision in the developing neural tube. This combination of experimental and computational advances provides a robust framework for studying the complex dynamics of development at unprecedented scale and resolution. The work recasts single-cell analyses from descriptions of observed data to models of the dynamics that generated them, providing a framework for investigating developmental fate decisions. This work is published.

Rory’s unique combination of creativity, determination, and technical expertise is responsible for the success of the project. His exceptional strengths in both experimental and computational approaches, spanning molecular biology to machine learning, gives him an ability to tackle complex biological problems from multiple angles. But his ability is not limited to technical skills. He is a deep thinker and has developed a clear and far-reaching view of the future of developmental biology. These scholarly capabilities are evidenced by his invited review on single-cell transcriptomics, which he authored independently following a well-received presentation at the Royal Society. We are also completing an article that sets out a vision for developmental biology in the single cell genomics era. In short, Rory is both a thinker and a doer.

The impact of Rory’s work is already evident in the catalytic effect it is having in the field. It has attracted substantial funding (three grants: CRUK Development, Crick I2I Funding, BBSRC project grant) and underpins five new projects in the lab, including single-cell screening of glioma transcription factors, timeresolved sequencing of organoids, and targeted sequencing approaches. Beyond our group, it has enabled new collaborations in cancer screening, neurodegeneration research, and immunology with leading labs. Most notably, this work formed the foundation for Rory’s successful fellowship application for post-doc at EBI and Sanger, where he will further develop these approaches.

Rory exemplifies the qualities we hope to cultivate in our field: deep theoretical understanding combined with practical capability, rigorous methodology alongside creative vision, and the ability to both conceive and execute transformative research. He is not just technically accomplished but a profound thinker about the future of developmental biology and a clear communicator. His work demonstrates both the insight to identify fundamental challenges and the skill to address them systematically.

Given the extraordinary breadth and depth of his contributions, his proven ability to execute complex interdisciplinary projects, and the clear impact his work is already having on the field, I believe Rory Maizels is an outstanding recipient of the Beddington Medal. He represents the kind of scientist who will help lead our field into its next phase, where we can finally begin to build a comprehensive understanding of development.

James Briscoe

Until a few months ago, Sally was our BSDB meeting secretary and she was outstanding in this role, bringing many new initiatives including the BSDB childcare and disability travel awards. She pushed hard in many ways for diversity, inclusivity and sustainability, so that during her tenure the BSDB became one of the leading drivers of new ways of running conferences.  This climaxed with our recent hosting of the European Dev Biol Congress where she pushed for – and made work – a programme made up largely of ECR speakers from across Europe, with a unique three hub arrangement with interdigitating talks beamed in from Paris and Barcelona to the central host hub of Oxford.  This was a pioneering “experiment” that could have gone badly wrong, but instead worked exceptionally well, and will have set a precedent for others to follow. Several colleagues from sister dev biol societies across Europe congratulated us on how brave the BSDB was to run such a meeting and how successful it had been.  This kudos for the BSDB was largely down to Sally.

Over the years, Sally has also held and still holds numerous other, largely unsung, roles in the dev biol and broader scientific community.  Some of those that are most relevant in the context of this Medal for communication and outreach include:

She is a Director of the CoB and chair of their sustainable conferencing initiative;

She is Co-Organiser (since 2014) of the Hydra summer school in stem cell and regenerative medicine;

She is part of the “prelights” scientific advisory group, which promotes open science and supporting of ECRs.

She is a trustee and the treasurer of the stem cell education and charitable initiative to support various science education projects;

She is the member for education on the Int Soc Stem Cell Research committee;

She is the outreach coordinator for the “Self organising built environment” with the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, which explores links between dev biol and urban planning.

Sally instigated and has been involved in the set up and running of several sci-art exhibitions, linked to the BSDB Spring meeting. These have reached audiences outside of the developmental biology community.

All of these things that Sally has been doing for our community have helped popularise and widen participation in stem cell and developmental biology. In addition, she is also an outstanding scientist as reflected in her recent award in 2022 of the Int Soc Diffn, Anne McClaren Award for Outstanding Women in Dev Biol, and also being appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (also in 2022). This makes her voice even more significant and she is a fabulous role model to all young scientists of how to be both collegiate and kind as well as an exceptional scientist.  We think she is someone who is worthy of the Wolpert medal through the numerous ways she enables and facilitates cross communication and success in others in our field, and we know she would be a fantastic ambassador for the BSDB when she gives her Wolpert medal tour lectures.

• Paul Martin
• Jens Januschke
• Cynthia Andoniadou

Originally trained as an engineer and physicist, JP Vincent became a developmental biologist by accident, when his PhD advisor George Oster, a mechanical engineer turned biologist, suggested that he look at the fluid dynamics of Xenopus eggs. He was lucky to be hosted by John Gerhart for the wet part of this project and was quickly taken by the warmth of the developmental biology community and the range of questions that developmental biology addresses. Since then, JP has been inspired by classical questions of developmental biology such as axis formation, cell fate determination, morphogen gradient formation and tissue renewal, and strived to bring methods from other disciplines to address them. His work has questioned established dogma, uncovered new mechanisms, and brought outsiders into the developmental biology field.

JP’s work has been a firework of exciting and fundamental discoveries that have helped shape developmental biology as we know it. JP’s PhD led him to uncover the subcortical rotation, which specifies the embryonic axis of frog embryos (1). Towards the end of his PhD, molecular biology began to permeate developmental biology and he felt that he had to be part of this revolution. He was thrown in the deep end by joining the lab of Pat O’Farrell and became fascinated by the process of cell fate specification. With this in mind, he developed, in collaboration with Tim Mitchison, the first photoactivable lineage tracer and used this to show that ‘posterior identity’, as recognised by the expression of engrailed, was stable but still open to change in response to signalling.

JP’s interest in the signaling pathways that control engrailed expression led to a love affair with Wnt signaling. In one early line of research, he showed that   Catenin exists in two exchangeable pools, one devoted to cell adhesion and the other to Wnt signaling, suggesting an intimate connection between signalling and morphogenesis (2). This paradigm-building discovery remains integral to our understanding of the Wnt signalling pathway. Influenced by discussions with Peter Lawrence, JP realized that it was important to determine the range of Wnt and other signaling proteins. Over the years, JP has identified many relevant factors and processes (e.g. endocytic trafficking, glypicans and feedback inhibitors) and has demonstrated their function in shaping Wingless morphogen gradients. In recent collaborative work with the group of Yvonne Jones, JP’s group showed how the carboxylesterase Notum inactivates Wnts in the extracellular space and how the glypican Dally-like accommodates the Wnt lipid (3-4). His discoveries, fuelled by extraordinary creativity and scientific playfulness, have provided a comprehensive model for how a paradigm morphogen gradient is created and maintained. His interest in the spread of signalling molecules has led him to another long-standing collaboration, with Guillaume Salbreux. Together, they showed that GFP could be repurposed as a morphogen, a key step towards synthetic developmental biology (5).

Throughout the course of his career, JP has created many new links between developmental biology and other disciplines, most prominently cell biology, physics, structural biology and chemistry. He has contributed to adapting various techniques to the needs of developmental biology. For example, he used HRP fusion proteins to track Wingless by EM. His senior scientific officer, Cyrille Alexandre, was the first to adapt CRISPR to Drosophila. He then devised sophisticated genome engineering approaches to express reporters and modified proteins from endogenous loci. Recently, with Yohanns Bellaiche, he developed optogenetic tools to control gene expression with unparalleled spatiotemporal precision. JP embodies the true spirit of collegiality in our community and generously shares reagents as soon as they are useable.

JP has contributed to a lively discourse within the developmental biology community. He has organised many conferences, including a BSDB spring meeting, two Developmental Biology Gordon conferences and two Jacques Monod conferences on Developmental mechanisms. JP was a member of the BSDB committee from 2000 to 2005 and of the BSCB committee from 2010 to 2015. He has served as an editor at Developmental Biology, Science Signalling and Phil Trans B. He is (or has been) on the scientific advisory board/review panel of various developmental biology departments (Curie’s Unit of Genetics and Developmental Biology, EMBL’s department of Developmental Biology, Institute de Biologie du Development de Marseille, Toulouse’s Centre for Integrative Biology, the Gurdon Institute, VIB’s department of Developmental Biology). He has lectured on morphogens and morphogenesis not only in academic settings but also at the University of the Third Age and to undergraduates at Cambridge and UCL. JP has mentored many young developmental biologists both within and outside his group, and many of his trainees have developed into independent developmental biologists.

• Alex Gould
• Ottoline Leyser
• Eugenia Piddini

Marysia Placzek is an outstanding and internationally leading Developmental Biologist who has made significant contributions to our understanding of how signalling directs patterning of the vertebrate nervous system, and to leadership and pedagogy of the field. Marysia uncovered how tissue interactions and combinations of signals regulate the organisation of cell fate and assembly of neural circuits in the spinal cord and hypothalamus. Her papers are masterworks in precise observation and elegant experimental design, and many have become foundational. As deputy and then acting Director of the MRC Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics (2007-2013), Marysia has been instrumental in building Developmental Biology research at the University of Sheffield. She subsequently established the Bateson Centre, a cross-faculty inter-disciplinary research centre, to provide a focus for translational approaches to development and disease research at the University. In addition to leading research initiatives, Marysia is a passionate Developmental Biology teacher: running modules in Developmental Biology, Developmental Neurobiology, and Stem & Regenerative Biology. She is now bringing this, more than 20 years teaching experience, to a new role as co-editor, along with Cheryll Tickle, of Lewis Wolpert’s core textbook “Principles of Development”.

Following PhD research on proviral integration sites in mouse mammary carcinomas with Gordon Peters at the ICRF (1987-1992), Marysia moved to New York as a post-doc with Jane Dodd at Columbia University. During this time, she made two fundamental, textbook changing, contributions to our understanding of neural development. With Marc Tessier-Lavigne, she demonstrated that spinal cord floor-plate cells secrete a diffusible factor that influences the pattern and orientation of commissural axon growth (Nature 1988); this discovery presaged characterisation of the Netrin family of axon guidance molecules. She then went on to define the crucial role of the notochord/floor plate in patterning the central nervous system along its dorso-ventral axis (Science, 1990). The discovery of this fundamental tissue interaction underpinned the subsequent identification of Sonic hedgehog as the mediator of this activity, a breakthrough to which Marysia also contributed. As an independent investigator, Marysia has focussed on the role of the most anterior axial mesoderm, the prechordal plate, which emerges from the primitive streak just prior to the notochord. Marysia and her team have uncovered the mechanisms by which the prechordal plate orchestrates development of the hypothalamus (Cell 1997) and described the development of hypothalamic progenitors. A key discovery is the existence of a modified floor plate-like cell that displays stem cell-like characteristics and that gives rise to discrete hypothalamic progenitor cell populations, involving a mechanism that links cell specification and anisotropic growth (Developmental Cell 2006; Development 2017). By combining fate-mapping studies, classic embryological manipulations and cutting-edge molecular approaches, Marysia’s work is uncovering the developmental origins of these earliest hypothalamic stem/progenitor cells, and the signals that induce and constrain them (Development 2017; Cell Reports 2022). Together, her studies provide a roadmap for hypothalamic development, from its induction, to regionalisation, to neurogenesis, and challenge the widely accepted prosomere model of forebrain organization. Moreover, Marysia’s identification of this stem-like population in the embryo led to her work in the adult mouse, and one of the first detailed descriptions of the maintenance of neurogenic progenitors in the postnatal hypothalamus (Nature Comms. 2013), a paper that is widely cited as evidence for an adult hypothalamic stem cell niche.

Marysia is an embryologist par excellence and is known for her supportive mentoring of trainees. Her work is characterised by remarkable insight into tissue organisation of the early nervous system and an extraordinary ability to identify, dissect and manipulate unique cell populations. Her independent work has elucidated intrinsic and environmental mechanisms that regulate hypothalamic stem and progenitor cells across the life course. Marysia’s contributions to research have been recognised by award of the Otto Mangold Prize from the German Society for Developmental Biology (1999) and the MRC Suffrage Science Heirloom (2012). She has and continues to take a leading role in the Developmental Biology community and beyond. On return from USA as a new PI and new mother, she ran (with husband Andy Furley), an Autumn meeting for the BSDB (baby on hip), and faithfully sends her students and post-docs to BSDB meetings. Marysia has been a member of numerous funding panels for MRC, BBSRC, CRUK, and Wellcome Trust (see CV) and she is the current Chair of the new Wellcome Cell Biology, Development and Physiology Discovery Advisory Group. She is a very deserving candidate for the Waddington Medal.

• Kate Storey
• James Briscoe