Jean-Paul Vincent studied applied physics at the University of Louvain (Belgium) before completing a PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley. There he showed that a subcortical rotation in the frog egg specifies the embryonic axis. During his post-doc at UCSF, he helped devise the first photoactivatable cell lineage tracer. In1993, Jean-Paul became a principal investigator at the LMB in Cambridge before moving to the National Institute for Medical Research (London). He is now at the Francis Crick Institute where his interests span the signaling processes that control growth, apoptosis and patterning in developing epithelia. His main model system is Drosophila but he is also investigating the relevance of Wnt signaling in neurodegenerative disease in mice.