Abigail Tucker obtained her DPhil from Oxford University in the lab of Prof Jonathan Slack. She then worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Guy’s Hospital, London, in the labs of Prof Paul Sharpe and Prof Andrew Lumsden, where she started her interest in the development of teeth and jaws. She set up her own lab as a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development fellow in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London before moving to the Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology. She recently completed a Wellcome Senior Investigator Award and is currently funded by UKRI. She was awarded the Cheryll Tickle medal for her research into developmental biology, and is currently Dean for Research in the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral, and Craniofacial Sciences at King's. The lab studies how organs form during normal development and what goes wrong in the case of congenital birth defects, providing the mechanisms behind the defects to highlight potential new treatments and preventative strategies.