Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz moved to Cambridge 23 years ago from Poland and is now a professor at the University of Cambridge, where she runs a laboratory and leads a team of 17 postdoctoral scientists and graduate students. She is also a Wellcome Trust Fellow and Visiting Professor at Caltech. She has published more than 120 papers, lectured all over the world and received numerous awards and honours. Her work on embryos won the people's vote for the scientific breakthrough of the year in Science magazine.