Robin Lovell-Badge, PhD, FRS, is Head of the Division of Developmental Genetics at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill in London, UK. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Biochemistry Department of the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College, London. He obtained his PhD in embryology at UCL in 1978, before carrying out postdoctoral research in the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge and at the Institute Jacques Monod in Paris. In 1982 he was appointed Staff Scientist at the MRC Mammalian Development Unit in London, before moving to the NIMR in 1988. He is a member of EMBO and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. He received the 1995 Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Amory Prize for 1996 (awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), for his work on sex determination, which included the discovery of the gene on the Y chromosome that triggers embryos to develop as males.

Robin has had long-standing interests in the biology and uses of embryonic stem cells, in how genes work in the context of embryo development and how decisions of cell fate are reached as the embryo forms. Major themes of his current work include sex determination, development of the nervous system and stem cells in the embryo. He is very keen to increase public engagement with science and has participated in many debates in the UK and elsewhere on stem cell research and genetics.