Celebrating the Hunterian Museum and the RCS England Odontological Collection: A world class insight into our origins and future life on planet earth

Abigail Tucker obtained her DPhil from Oxford University in 1996 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. Here she started her interest in formation of the head. She set up her own lab as a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development fellow in 1999 in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s. In 2002 she moved to the Department of Craniofacial Development within the Dental Institute at King’s College London and was promoted to Professor in 2015. She recently completed a Wellcome Senior Investigator Award and is currently funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Prof Tucker is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Anatomical Society, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Emeritus Professor Christopher Dean studied dental surgery at UCL. After qualifying in 1975 he worked in general dental practice, first full time and then part time, in Camden, Islington and Oxford, until 2003. In parallel he studied human biology and then completed a PhD on the comparative anatomy of the hominoid cranial base at The Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1983. In 1985 he was appointed Wellcome Trust Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy, now Cell and Developmental Biology, at UCL where he first taught dental histology and then anatomy to medical, dental and science students. He was promoted to Reader in 1990 and then Professor of Anatomy in 1996. He is currently part time at the Centre for Human Evolution Research, Natural History Museum, London, and is an emeritus professor at UCL. He has published extensively on comparative primate anatomy and dental histology and in 1990 with Prof. Leslie Aiello wrote “An introduction to human evolutionary anatomy”, Academic Press.