Shanta Persaud is Professor of Diabetes & Endocrinology at King’s College London, and Head of the Guy’s Campus Section of the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences. She has worked in the field of islet biology since undertaking her PhD in 1986 and she has published extensively on mechanisms regulating islet function and the potential for targeting islet GPCRs to increase functional beta cell mass. More recently, she has applied scRNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic technologies to profile spatial landscapes of developing human pancreas endocrine cells, and she is currently investigating mechanisms to improve the generation of functional stem cell-derived beta cells. She is Basic Science Editor of the Diabetes UK Journal ‘Diabetic Medicine’.