Brendan graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Chemistry from Pomona College (in California) in 2020. As a PhD student under the co-supervision of Prof Wolf Reik and Prof Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (CRUK CI), Brendan is employing single-cell methods to probe gene-regulatory mechanisms underlying mammalian germ layer specification. He is funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and a Cooke Graduate Scholarship.