Tim Byatt

I am a postdoctoral research scientist in the Simões Group, specialising in developmental biology. I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol in 2024, where I focused on a cross-kingdom comparison to identify novel wound response proteins through parallel studies in zebrafish and Arabidopsis.

I joined the Simões Group to study heart development as part of the BBSRC-funded CellTalk Human Heart Development consortium. My current research integrates both in vivo and in vitro approaches to uncover the mechanisms driving cardiogenesis, with a particular focus on cellular niches and cell-cell communication within the developing heart.

My in vitro work utilises human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived models, including 2D cellular systems and 3D cardiac organoids. In parallel, I use zebrafish as an in vivo model to identify and validate evolutionarily conserved niches and regulatory signals derived from cross-species studies of cardiogenesis. Using multiomic approaches, my research identifies key similarities and differences between in vitro and in vivo models, as well as in comparison to the human scenario, to reveal how accurately these models reflect the complexity of human heart development.