Dr Madeline Lancaster is a Group Leader in the Cell Biology Division of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, UK. Madeline joined the LMB in 2015, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna, where she developed brain organoids.
Research in the Lancaster lab focuses on brain development using stem cells to generate brain organoids that allow in vitro modelling. The laboratory studies the most fundamental evolutionary differences in brain development, using human stem cells and reprogrammed cells obtained from other primates and even more distant mammalian species. So far, this work has uncovered human-specific neurodevelopmental processes leading to increased expansion and helping explain our enlarged brain size.
Madeline was awarded the 3Rs Prize by the National Centre for Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) in 2015 for her development of brain organoids, and was chosen as an EMBO Young Investigator in 2019. She was awarded the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) Dr Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator and a Vallee Scholarship in 2021. Madeline was honoured as the Laureate for Life Sciences in the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in the UK and was elected an EMBO member in 2022.
