I did my Ph.D. with Stephen Wilson in the Randall Institute and then the in Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, at University College London. I studied the expression and function of signalling factors involved in patterning the presumptive CNS in the early zebrafish embryo. As part of my work I characterised mst1, which is related to scatter factor/HGF, and is implicated in neural induction.

I worked with Peter Currie at the MRC Human Geneitcs Unit in Edinburgh on many later aspects of muscle tissue formation in the zebrafish embryo, taking a complementary approach to the work carried out in Pete's lab on muscle specification by signalling events. I was interested in developing zebrafish models of genetic disease processes which specifically affect human muscle tissue, concentrating mainly on developing zebrafish models of muscular dystrophy and congenital myopathies, and examining the embryonic expression and functions of known muscular dystrophy-associated genes, such as the Dystrophin Associated Protein Complex, which is associated with many human diseases.

I am now independent at the Institute of Human Genetics in Newcastle in the north-east of England, working on both muscle and heart disease models in collaboration with other groups in the IHG. In particular, I will continue to investigate the pathology of dystrophin deficiency.