The shape of an object lies at the interface between vision and cognition, yet general purpose theories of shape for applications in bio-medicine, robotics and industry have been notoriously difficult to formulate. Drawing on techniques from singularity theory, partial differential equations, geometric flows and graph theory, our group is broadly concerned with the problem of shape analysis in computational vision and medical imaging. A key theme is the development of "generic" models, which support a notion of similarity between qualitatively similar shapes.