Madeline Lancaster is a group leader in the Cell Biology Division of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, UK. She studied biochemistry at Occidental College before completing a Ph.D. in 2010 in biomedical sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Before joining the LMB in 2015, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna, where she developed the first cerebral organoids.

Research in the Lancaster lab focuses on human brain development using stem cells to generate brain organoids that allow modeling of human brain development in vitro. In addition to developing new organoid-based technologies, the laboratory studies fundamental differences between human brain development and that of other mammalian species.