Berta Verd

I am a somewhat unusual breed of biologist. A mathematician by training, I spent a year studying a Masters degree in sociology of science before moving into biology during my second Masters degree in Systems and Synthetic Biology at Imperial College, London. Through my Masters research, it became clear to me that interdisciplinary approaches held huge potential to help us understand the central problems in biology, and I've been hooked ever since. I moved to the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona to pursue a doctorate degree in evolutionary and developmental systems biology under the supervision of Dr. Johannes Jaeger. During my PhD I used data-driven mathematical modelling to study pattern formation during segment determination in flies. I developed mathematical tools to characterise gene expression dynamics, allowing us to compare these amongst different arthropod species. This work helped us understand how gene regulatory networks drive gene expression dynamics in developmental processes and shape their evolution. In October 2017 I joined the Steventon Lab in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge as a Herchel-Smith Postdoctoral Fellow where I combined experimental embryology, microscopy and dynamical modelling to understand axial elongation and patterning in zebrafish and cichlid embryos. Since April 2020, I am the Associate Professor of Computational and Theoretical Biology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in the Biological Sciences at Jesus College.