After an undergraduate degree in engineering (agronomy) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Anne Goriely obtained a Ph.D. studying the development of the nervous system of the Drosophila. She spent four years in New York, at the Cornell Medical School and Rockefeller University, before coming to the University of Oxford to work on the nervous system development of the chick embryo. In 2000, she joined the team of Professor Andrew Wilkie at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (University of Oxford), where she is still based. She is currently associate professor of human genetics in Oxford and her main interests lie in elucidating the process of spontaneous mutation in humans.