Developmental and stem cell biologist Anna-Katerina (Kat) Hadjantonakis is a Member of the Developmental Biology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute and a Professor at Cornell University in New York, USA. Her lab seeks to understand how cells regulate their identity, and how they coordinately and reproducibly build complex organs in mammalian embryos, and in in vitro stem cell and organoid models. She received a BSc in Biochemistry in 1990, and PhD in Molecular Genetics in 1995, from Imperial College London, UK. She then undertook postdoctoral training, first with Drs. Andras Nagy at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto, Canada, and thereafter with Dr. Virginia Pappaioannou at Columbia University, New York, USA. She established her independent research group at Sloan Kettering in 2004. She currently serves on the editorial boards of journals including Developmental Cell, Development and Developmental Biology. She is a standing member of grant review panels and advisory committees for the NIH, the NSF, the UK’s Wellcome Trust, and the European Research Council.