Tony Perry received his B.Sc. in Microbiology from the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Bristol, England and his doctorate from the University of Liverpool four years later. In 1989 he became a postdoctoral fellow working on epididymal sperm maturation at the University of Bristol and in 1996 won a European Molecular Biology Travel Fellowship to work on the mechanism of oocyte activation, which remains one of his research interests. He then moved first to the Rockefeller University and subsequently to Advanced Cell Technology, working primarily on novel methods of genome manipulation. In 2002 he took his present position as Team Leader of the Laboratory of Mammalian Molecular Embryology at the RIKEN CDB, where he works on mechanisms in mammalian preimplantation embryos.