About us

A message from Prof Barbara Conradt, Head of Research Department

Welcome! Our department has a long-standing tradition of answering fundamental questions in biology. Indeed, our history stretches back to the foundation of UCL in 1826, when the Chairs of Anatomy and Comparative Anatomy were created as two of the original twenty-four at the College. As the Research Department ‘Cell and Developmental Biology’, we continue to maintain a question-driven approach to science, backed-up by the application of the very latest in research technologies. Our mission is to gain mechanistic insight into biological processes across scales, spanning from cells to tissues to whole organisms and from milliseconds to minutes to hundreds of millions of years. Research in the department therefore encompasses a wide spectrum of basic biomedical investigation, from animal development, stem cell biology, functional and evolutionary morphology, to neuroscience, organelle biology and cell signalling.

Alumni of the department include pioneers such as Grafton Elliot Smith, J.Z. Young and Lewis Wolpert and our work has been consistently rated as world-leading, as exemplified by the 2014 Nobel Prize awarded to Professor John O'Keefe. The department comprises of research groups, including around 200 research fellows, technicians, PhD students and support staff, and continues to expand in the 21st century with new initiatives such as the UCL Centre for Integrative Anatomy (CIA).

A detailed history of the department can be found here (PDF)

I hope you will enjoy exploring our website and learning about our many research, teaching and public engagement activities.

Prof Barbara Conradt
Head of Research Department