Cell scientist to watch - Madeline Lancaster.

Madeline Lancaster received her first degree in biochemistry from the Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, and continued to follow her interests by pursuing a PhD in biomedical sciences in the laboratory of Joseph Gleeson at University of California, San Diego. She then left the USA to train as a postdoctoral fellow with Jürgen Knoblich at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Madeline was a recipient of the EMBO, Helen Hay Whitney and Marie Curie Incoming Fellowships, and in 2014 her work was recognised when she was awarded the Eppendorf Award for Young Investigators. She started her own lab at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK in 2015 and her group uses brain organoids to unravel the general principles of brain evolution, focusing on human brain development, as well as studying neurological diseases that involve defects in brain size.