We are delighted to nominate Cynthia for her outstanding contribution to science and her extensive contributions to developmental biology.

Cynthia has established an internationally recognised research programme in pituitary gland development and stem cell biology, helping to redefine this field by revealing how developmental mechanisms govern tissue plasticity and disease. Her research has provided insights into the development of several congenital pituitary diseases (including pituitary hypoplasia, pituitary stalk interruption syndrome and Rathke’s cleft cyst). In addition, it has brought key mechanistic understanding for the pathogenesis of developmental pituitary tumours that present in childhood, providing a leading example of how developmental mechanisms become deregulated in cancer.

Her work identified SOX2⁺ cells as the functional pituitary stem/progenitor population orchestrating organ growth and differentiation and key signalling mechanisms regulating their fates. She demonstrated that pituitary stem cells control tissue turnover through paracrine signalling to neighbouring progenitors i.e. through feed-forward signalling, in addition to contributing new endocrine cells. Extending these findings to other endocrine organs, her team identified the postnatal stem cells of the adrenal medulla, redefining cellular hierarchies in adrenal biology and demonstrating that they share similar mechanisms for promoting turnover. These discoveries overturned long-standing assumptions of endocrine homeostasis and established a new paradigm for how adult stem cells can regulate organ maintenance.

Cynthia Andoniadou joined King’s in 2013, to investigate the stem cell compartment in the mammalian pituitary gland. In the last 12 years, since she established an independent lab, she has become a key player in pituitary research and extended to other endocrine systems. She is held in extremely high regard, due to her uncompromisingly high standards and seminal studies, becoming Dean of Research in 2025. Importantly, she has spear-headed effective collaborations with physiologists and clinical specialists, ensuring that her studies are translated, and have direct clinical implication. Her ability to combine mouse and human studies is exceptional – for instance, the human pituitary atlas is likely to becomes a world-wide resource. Cynthia is a great role model to her group and was awarded the prestigious KCL Supervisory Excellence award by her faculty, nominated by her students.

In addition to her research, Cynthia has been involved in learned societies. She was the Treasurer for the BSDB (2019-2024), in which time she interacted with the Company of Biologists and was able to juggle the funds of the society to support more students to attend meetings and learn through summer studentships. She is the Chair of the European congress of Endocrinology from 2022-2026 and co-founded the European Women in Endocrinology initiative (EUWIN).

Cynthia is an outstanding colleague – rapidly appraising a scientific problem, and coming up with possible explanations and hypotheses, and happy to share her time. Her hard work, her persistence and ingenuity will ensure that he will rapidly advance our understanding of important and fundamental processes in development and stem cells in endocrine organs.

In summary, I am certain that the strong career that Cynthia has already developed, through her love of science, will continue to flourish. She is a great example of the researchers we should be celebrating with awards such as the Tickle Medal.

• • Abigail Tucker
  • Tristan Rodriguez

James Briscoe needs no introduction, as one of the most prominent developmental biologists in the UK. What we find surprising is that he has not yet been awarded this medal, as he fulfils all the expectations of awardees.

James was an undergraduate at Warwick where he studied microbiology and virology. He moved to the ICRF at Lincoln’s Inn Fields to work on interferons for his PhD, before joining Tom Jessell’s lab at Columbia University, where he started to work on the early development of the nervous system. He returned to the UK to become a group leader at the National Institute for Medical Research in 2000, later moving with the NIMR to the Francis Crick Institute. His work has focused on the development of the vertebrate spinal cord, using a highly multidisciplinary approach, with the specific aim of unravelling the classical question of how morphogens work, getting down to the nitty-gritty of the molecular mechanisms, while not losing sight of the bigger picture and the cellular and embryonic context. He has developed many new techniques which have themselves made a mark, always designed to answer a particularly difficult question, including the mechanism by which a cell integrates information from multiple signalling inputs to decide between alternative identities. His publications are characterised by their exceptional quality, and by the clarity of presentation and experimental design. He has also been keen to incorporate mathematical and computational modelling to explore the limits of the system and used these to predict the outcome of experiments. The few examples listed below provide a taster – perhaps his most important and elegant study is the demonstration of how a cell distinguishes between different concentrations (thresholds) of the morphogen Sonic Hedgehog to acquire different neuronal identities along the ventral-to-dorsal axis of the neural tube/spinal cord.

Appropriately, James has received many honours, including election as a fellow of both the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the Royal Society, and he is an EMBO Gold medallist.

As expected of the profile of Waddington medal winners, James has played numerous roles in promoting developmental biology in the UK and worldwide, as well as supporting early career researchers. He has been involved with the Company of Biologists for more than 20 years, first as a Director, and since 2018 as Editor-in-Chief of “Development”. In that role, he has been promoting the rejuvenation of developmental biology through appointment of new editors and editorial board members, as well as the introduction of a new section called “Meet the authors”, generally focusing on the younger members of the teams along with their PI. At the same time, he has been stimulating the publication of papers in currently trendy areas including stem cell biology, human development, mechanobiology and computational biology and modelling. He serves on multiple advisory boards and committees, and is an excellent mentor for members of his team and others. He is also an advocate of scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds or working in adverse conditions, a recent example being the last publication on the list below.

His upbringing was on a farm in the South of England, where he was surrounded by farm animals and has revealed at an interview in Development that he is even able to milk a goat!

We feel that James would be a perfect recipient of the 2026 Waddington medal.

• Claudio Stern
• Jim Smith

Neil Vargesson has made outstanding contributions to the public understanding of chemically-induced birth differences by making research on the mechanisms of action of Thalidomide and Primodos accessible to a wide audience. His advice has changed health policies and benefitted many affected families in the UK and worldwide.

Neil has worked on thalidomide for 20 years. His interest dates to when he was a child. Neil has a childhood family friend who was damaged by Thalidomide, and this led him to wanting to understand how the drug exerted its teratogenic effects. His research demonstrated that the antiangiogenic action of Thalidomide causes the damage and birth differences, and that this action on blood vessels can also explain the drug’s well-known time-sensitive actions. He also identified molecular targets for the drug’s action on the blood vessels.

More recently, Neil has also studied a chemical called Primodos – often known as ‘the forgotten thalidomide’. Primodos was used as a hormone pregnancy test and is alleged to have caused birth differences in many babies in the UK and Germany. His research showed that zebrafish embryos exhibit vascular, neural, eye and fin damage following exposure, resembling the damage seen in human survivors. Neil has been heavily involved with public engagement of developmental biology and has made his research accessible to a wide audience ranging from the general public, including school children and patients to Government policy makers.

Based on his research on Thalidomide, Neil is internationally recognised as an expert in the field. He has advised Thalidomide survivor groups, individuals, parliamentarians, lawyers, and many media organisations in the UK, US, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Malta, Canada, and Australia about how Thalidomide causes damage. He has created a Thalidomide learning module for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, to teach and train medical practitioners in identifying Thalidomide embryopathy. This online resource is used by health care professionals from around the world, including the UK and is recommended by the UK Thalidomide Trust.

His research on Primodos has been featured in two Sky Documentaries hosted by Jason Farrell (both nominated for Royal Television Society awards) and in over 100 interviews in UK and international media. He has also advised Primodos survivors, parliamentarians and lawyers in the UK and Germany about his research on Primodos and what damage it can cause to embryos.

Neil’s passion for public engagement and public understanding is further demonstrated by numerous Outreach activities (including TechFest, Café Scientifique, podcasts, visiting Schools and writing numerous articles for ‘theconversation.com’) which inform different audiences about developmental biology and raise awareness of medicine safety.

Neil’s interactions with Governments and Policy makers have led to societal change. His expert advice on the effects of Thalidomide to the World Health Organisation has led to new guidance about Thalidomide embryopathy and its identification. It has resulted in the establishment of major compensation schemes in Canada and Australia resulting in the recognition and life-long compensation for Thalidomide survivors (more than $100M in compensation has been awarded so far). As a member of a multi-disciplinary committee (in the UK, Canada, and Australia) he reviews alleged survivors applications seeking recognition and compensation. His research on Primodos was debated in the House of Commons and helped establish an Independent Medicine and Medical Devices Safety Review on Primodos safety, which led to Recommendations for compensation and an apology to survivors from the UK Government. He has also advised the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (UK) and the European Medicines Agency about Primodos and medicine safety.

Neil’s contributions to science and public engagement, and the societal impact of his research, were recognised by the University of Aberdeen Principal’s Prize for Public Engagement with Research in 2017 and by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021.

• Cheryll Tickle
• Jim Smith

It is a great pleasure to write in strong support of Valentina Lorenzi for the BSDB Beddington Medal. As Valentina’s PhD supervisor at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, I have had the privilege of mentoring her for over five years. During this time, she has distinguished herself as an exceptional early-career scientist, combining intellectual independence, technical innovation, and deep biological insight, and has made contributions that have already had a significant impact across reproductive developmental biology, immunology, and organoid modelling. Given the depth, originality, and impact of her achievements, she stands among the very best young researchers worldwide.

Through two co-first author publications on human gonadal and reproductive tract development, Valentina resolved previously uncharacterised differentiation trajectories that give rise to sexually dimorphic reproductive organs from an initially shared set of embryonic precursor structures. She also identified candidate molecular programmes guiding early fate specification, sex-specific differentiation, and tissue remodelling during gestation. Her work is characterised by a rare ability to integrate core developmental biology principles directly into computational modelling, embedding knowledge from model organisms and general rules of tissue patterning to interpret sparse and heterogeneous human data in the absence of existing reference atlases.

Valentina’s early work in my laboratory, beginning at the Master’s level, focused on human gonadal development and resulted in a co-first author publication.  In this study, she delineated the hierarchical organization of stem and progenitor cells in the gonads, demonstrating that while core cell states are conserved between humans and mice, many defining molecular markers are species-specific. The observation that cell states appear to evolve at a slower pace than gene expression has implications for our understanding of reproductive disorders such as Differences in Sex Development, where diagnostic frameworks are largely derived from mouse genetics. In this context, Valentina’s atlas provides a valuable source of candidate human-specific markers. In addition, she identified previously unrecognised macrophage populations in the human fetal testes, including a TREM2-positive population with a likely yolk-sac origin and immunoregulatory features. This work has been widely adopted by the community (cited nearly 300 times) and has informed the interpretation of genetic studies of differences in sex development.

Building on this foundational work, Valentina undertook an exceptionally ambitious PhD project: to characterise the development of the entire human reproductive tract across prenatal development, at a time when no cell-resolved reference existed for any of these tissues. This required the integration of data from rare and precious human fetal samples spanning multiple organs, developmental stages, and sexes, each with substantial morphological variability. Through a deeply biologically informed computational framework, Valentina successfully combined single-cell transcriptomics, chromatin accessibility profiling, and spatial genomics to generate the first comprehensive, spatially continuous atlas of Müllerian and Wolffian duct, urogenital sinus and genital tubercle development in humans. The resulting paper represents a major conceptual advance in developmental biology. Valentina’s analyses uncovered putative novel regulators of Müllerian duct emergence and regression, and refined our understanding of HOX-based mesenchymal patterning of the Müllerian and Wolffian ducts. Indeed, she showed unexpected thoracic HOX activity in the rostral mesenchyme of the fallopian tubes and epididymis, challenging canonical view of reproductive tract axial regionalisation. Moreover, this work shed light previously unreported heterogeneity within the epithelium of the fetal fallopian tube and epididymis, revealing that

transcriptional domains associated with sperm capacitation and sperm maturation are established much earlier in development than previously assumed. In the case of the fallopian tube, early regional epithelial identity has direct relevance to current models of high-grade serous ovarian cancer, which implicate the fallopian tube fimbrial epithelium as the cell-of-origin. Finally, Valentina predicted the potential effects of drugs and endocrine disruptors on Müllerian and Wolffian duct development in utero, and her predictions were validated using fetal reproductive organoids.

In addition to her first-author work, Valentina has made substantial contributions to a range of collaborative projects within and beyond my laboratory. She has leveraged her work on human gonadal development to support the Surani laboratory in benchmarking in vitro germline models against her single-cell and spatial atlases. Moreover, Valentina has provided computational and analytical expertise to collaborative studies of the human endometrium and in vitro macrophage development where her input has shaped both experimental design and biological interpretation of complex datasets.

During her PhD, Valentina was also selected to attend the Frontiers in Reproduction course at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, USA to complement her computational expertise with hands-on exposure to classical and modern experimental approaches in reproductive biology. This decision reflects her intellectual maturity and her commitment to developing into a fully rounded, independent scientist.

Beyond her exceptional research accomplishments, Valentina is an outstanding communicator. She has presented her work at several international conferences, demonstrating not only her technical expertise but also her remarkable ability to explain complex scientific concepts in a clear, engaging, and accessible manner. Her presentations are consistently well-received, showcasing her talent for delivering clear, compelling and impactful scientific narratives.

Valentina’s dedication to translating research into real-world impact is equally remarkable. As former president of the Cambridge Femtech Society, she has demonstrated visionary leadership in fostering a community of students and alumni committed to advancing women’s health through technology. Moreover, in her last year of PhD training, Valentina founded and led the creation of the illustrated gynaecological health awareness zine Pelvic Matters (https://ventolab.org/pelvicmatters-outreach/). Pelvic Matters has been distributed across institutes in Cambridge to improve health literacy and reduce stigma. Her initiatives in this space exemplify her drive to ensure that her research benefits society at large.

On a personal level, Valentina is a highly valued member of our team. Her kindness, reliability, and collaborative spirit make her a pleasure to work with, fostering a positive and productive environment. Her enthusiasm and strong interpersonal skills foster harmonious collaborations, further amplifying the impact of her technical expertise.

In summary, Valentina’s doctoral work represents a rare combination of conceptual originality, technical innovation, and biological insight. Her research has already reshaped our understanding of human reproductive tract development, and I am confident that she will continue to make field-defining contributions in the years to come and is therefore an exceptional candidate for the BSDB Beddington Medal.

Roser Vento-Tormo

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