Claudio Stern

Claudio Stern was born in Uruguay, and moved to the United Kingdom where he took a BSc in Biological Sciences and PhD at Sussex University, followed by postdoc at University College London. After a year as Demonstrator in Cambridge he was University Lecturer in Oxford (1985-1994), then Chair of Genetics and Development at Columbia University, New York. He returned to UCL in 2001 as “J Z Young Professor” and Head (until 2011) of the Department of Anatomy (now Cell) and Developmental Biology. Claudio Stern has been elected a Fellow of many academies including the Royal Society, Academy of Medical Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of EMBO and was awarded the Waddington Medal from the British Society for Developmental Biology. He was also President of the International Society for Developmental Biology (2010-2013).

Claudio Stern’s research focuses on the processes that establish cell diversity and pattern in the early embryo, particularly to understand how complexity is set up and how the “programme” for development is encoded in the genome. This inevitably took him to appreciate the importance of timing in developmental decisions very early on, and many aspects of his work have touched on this. Currently, he is interested in the role of timing during both somite formation and in the developmental decisions accompanying neural induction.

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