Shankar Srinivas

Shankar Srinivas is Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics at the University of Oxford, based at the Institute for Developmental and Regenerative Medicine.

He has been interested in the emergence of shapes in biology for as long as he can remember. After completing a BSc at Nizam College in Hyderabad, India, he joined the group of Frank Costantini at Columbia University, New York, where he received a PhD for work on the molecular genetics of kidney development. Following this, he moved to the NIMR in Mill Hill, London, where he worked as an HFSPO fellow in the groups of Rosa Beddington and Jim Smith, studying how the anterior-posterior axis is established. There, he pioneered the use of time-lapse microscopy to study early post-implantation mouse embryos. Since establishing his independent group at the University of Oxford in 2004, he has used mouse and human embryos as models to study the control of patterning and morphogenesis during the formation of the anterior-posterior axis, gastrulation and early cardiogenesis.