Professor Madelaine Bartlett’s runs a research laboratory at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University where she studies the genetics of plant development, and the role of developmental evolution in morphological evolution. She recently moved to the UK from the USA, where she worked as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and her undergraduate degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she grew up.