Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz is a Professor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology at the University of Cambridge. Her passion lies in understanding how the embryo is built and how embryonic cells decide their fate for the very first time. This passion led her to reveal the remarkable self-organising and self-correcting properties of embryos, pioneering the way for many studies of human and mouse embryogenesis. She directed studies of her team to create a technique that doubles the amount of time that human embryos can be cultured in the laboratory so they can reveal the beginnings of human life during embryo implantation.