Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is a Principal Investigator in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine.  He was previously a Sir Henry Dale Fellow of the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (2020–2026) and an Oxford BHF Centre of Research Excellence Transition Fellow (2018–2020). Prior to joining Oxford, Oliver completed his PhD at the University of Bristol and undertook postdoctoral training with Didier Stainier at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research.

Oliver's research aims to understand how the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems develop and function. These vascular networks are essential for maintaining tissue health by delivering oxygen and nutrients while removing waste products throughout the body. Central to these processes are endothelial cells, specialised epithelial cells that line blood and lymphatic vessels and play critical roles in tissue development, maintenance, and repair.

In recent years, his work identified the earliest known transcriptional regulator of endothelial cell specification (Reischauer*, Stone* et al., Nature, 2016), demonstrated that endothelial cells from distinct mesodermal origins preferentially generate specific blood and lymphatic vessel subtypes (Stone and Stainier, Developmental Cell, 2019), and uncovered a specialised progenitor population for lymphatic endothelial cells (Lupu*, Grainger*, Kirschnick* et al., Nature Cardiovascular Research, 2025).