Marta Shahbazi will start as a junior group leader at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in February 2020, focusing on how epithelial tissue shape regulates stem cell identity during development and regeneration. Marta did her PhD at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) under the supervision of Mirna Perez-Moreno, working on the basic mechanisms that preserve the shape and integrity of epidermal stem cells. For her post-doctoral training she joined the laboratory of Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge to study the morphogenesis of the embryo at the time of implantation. She established a system that allows human embryo development beyond implantation in vitro, and used it to explore the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate embryo remodelling.