The adult body of an animal has two histories. One is its embryonic history, in which it is built anew each generation from a fertilised egg cell. The other is its evolutionary history, how evolutionary selection has shaped the diversification of adult forms over the 600 million years since the first animals arose. Central to both is how the information encoded in the genome is turned into shape and form by the processes of developmental biology.

In September’s Balliol Online Lecture Professor Shimeld will explore how some of these processes work, the surprising amount we as humans share with even distantly related animals like worms and jellyfish, and how changes to genes and mechanisms may result in changes to the final adult form and what this means for how diversity has evolved.

Professor Sebastian Shimeld studied zoology as an undergraduate and developmental genetics as a postgraduate, before working for a while at Guy’s Hospital in London. In 1995 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Medical Research Council to initiate work on the evolution and control of spinal cord development in embryos.

In 2004 he relocated his research group to Oxford, where he is the Julian Huxley Fellow at Balliol and Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology in the Department of Biology. His work uses experimental approaches from evolutionary biology, developmental biology, cell biology and genomics to ask how the information in the genome regulates the development of animal embryos, and how these mechanisms have changed through evolutionary time to give us the huge diversity of animal forms that inhabit our planet.