Joined the Board in January 2021 and became the Chair of our Science and Impact Advisory Board (SIAC) in December 2023.

James Briscoe is a group leader and assistant research director at the Francis Crick Institute. He obtained a BSc in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick, UK. Following his PhD research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London, he undertook postdoctoral training at Columbia University, New York, USA, first as a Human Frontiers Science Program Fellow then as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow.

In 2000 he moved to the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research (now part of the Francis Crick Institute) to establish his own research group and in 2001 he was elected an EMBO Young Investigator. He was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal in 2008 and elected to EMBO in 2009. In 2018 he became Editor in Chief of Development, a journal published by the Company of Biologists, a not-for-profit scientific publisher. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019.

His research interests include the molecular and cellular mechanisms of embryonic development. To address these questions his lab uses a range of experimental and computational techniques with model systems that include mouse and chick embryos and embryonic stem cells.