Duncan Sparrow completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide in the field of the regulation of tissue-specific transcription. He moved to the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill for his first postdoc, where he worked with Dr Tim Mohun on the developmental biology of heart and skeletal muscle formation in Xenopus laevis. He then returned to Australia to take up the position of Senior Research Scientist in Professor Sally Dunwoodie's laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. There he investigated the genetic and environmental causes of congenital vertebral malformation in human patients and mouse models.