Tristan is a Professor of Cell and Developmental biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London. He did his PhD in mouse genetics and a post-doc in developmental biology at the National Institute for Medical Research (London, UK), before starting his group with a Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine fellowship at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, London.

In 2011 he moved to Imperial, where the research of his group focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell fitness during development and how they become deregulated in disease. This work involves the study the pathways that prevent the propagation of aberrant cells, such as aneuploid cells and cells with mitochondrial dysfunction, as these are important contributors to a broad range of diseases. They take a multi-disciplinary approach that combines cell metabolism and signalling with the use of computational modelling to help understand the regulation of tissue dynamics.