Martin Pera, Ph.D.Editor-in-Chief Martin Pera received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. from George Washington University, and he undertook postdoctoral training in the UK at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He held independent research positions at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Department of Zoology at Oxford University before joining Monash University in 1996. In 2006 he moved to Los Angeles as the Founding Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of Southern California. He returned to Melbourne in 2011 to become Professor of Stem Cell Sciences at the University of Melbourne and Program Leader for Stem Cells Australia, the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative in Stem Cell Sciences. He joined the Jackson Laboratory in 2017.
Pera’s research focus is the cell biology of human pluripotent stem cells. His laboratory at Monash University was the second in the world to isolate embryonic stem cells from the human blastocyst, and the first to describe their differentiation into somatic cells in vitro. Currently his lab studies the regulation of self-renewal and pluripotency, heterogeneity in pluripotent stem cell populations, and neural specification of pluripotent stem cells. His early work on neural differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells helped lead to the development of a new treatment for macular degeneration, a common form of blindness, which is now entering clinical trials in Israel and California. He has provided extensive advice to state, national, and international regulatory authorities on the scientific background of human stem cell research, and he has delivered hundreds of commentaries for print and electronic media on stem cell research, ethics, and regulatory policy. At the Jackson Laboratory, he will use human stem cells and mouse models to study the genetic basis of individual differences in the response of the central nervous system to injury. Nissim Benvenisty, M.D., Ph.D.Associate Editor Nissim Benvenisty, M.D., Ph.D., is the Herbert Cohn Chair in Cancer Research and the director of the Stem Cell Unit at the Hebrew University. Dr. Benvenisty’s research projects focus on pluripotent stem cell biology, tissue engineering, molecular genetics in humans, and cancer research. He has published numerous original and review papers on human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Benvenisty earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Hebrew University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the Department of Genetics at the Hebrew University. Dr. Benvenisty serves on the editorial board of various stem cell related journals, and he is also a member of the steering committee of The International Stem Cell Initiative. Dr. Benvenisty has presented the issue of human embryonic stem cells in many international conferences, and gave testimonies before the US Senate and the European Union. He was awarded several prizes among them the Foulkes Prize (London), the Hestrin Prize, the Teva Prize, and the Kaye Prize.
Christine Mummery, Ph.D.Associate Editor Christine Mummery studied physics at the University of Nottingham, UK and has a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of London. After positions as a postdoc and tenured group leader at the Hubrecht Institute, she became a professor at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in 2002. After a sabbatical at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in 2007, she introduced human iPS cells to the Netherlands. In 2008, she became Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology. Her research concerns heart development and the differentiation of pluripotent human stem cells into the cardiac and vascular lineages and using these cells as disease models for safety pharmacology and drug discovery. Her immediate interests are developing biophysical techniques for characterization and functional analysis of cardiovascular cells from hPSCs. In 2015 she became a guest professor at the Technical University of Twente to develop organ-on-chip models. She was recently awarded a multimillion dollar grant for this purpose and is the awardee of a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant.
She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW) and board member and incoming president of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR); she is also a former board member of the KNAW and the Netherlands Medical Research Council (ZonMW). She was awarded the Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives in research, has co-authored a popular book on stem cells (“Stem Cells: Scientific Facts and Fiction,” second edition, 2014), and was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the ISSCR journal Stem Cell Reports. She is also on the editorial boards of Cell Stem Cell and Cardiovascular Research and Stem Cells. Jun Takahashi, M.D., Ph.D.Associate Editor Jun Takahashi is a professor and deputy director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. He graduated from the Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in 1986 and thereafter started his career as a neurosurgeon at Kyoto University Hospital. After he earned his Ph.D. from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Salk Institute (with Dr. Fred Gage) in California, where he started research work on neural stem cells. After returning to Kyoto University Hospital, he conducted functional neurosurgery including deep brain stimulation and also research work on stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. In 2012, he became a full professor at CiRA, pursuing stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s disease patients. As a physician-scientist, he has laid the groundwork for the clinical application of iPS cells by developing effective differentiation protocols to dopaminergic neurons, selective sorting of the differentiated dopaminergic progenitor cells, and optimization of the host brain environment to maximize the survival and function of the transplanted cells in rodent and monkey brains. Based on these achievements, he started the world’s first clinical trial for Parkinson’s disease using iPS cells in 2018.
Amy Wagers, Ph.D.Associate Editor Amy Wagers received her Ph.D. in immunology and microbial pathogenesis from Northwestern University in 1999 and completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Irving Weissman at Stanford University School of Medicine. In May 2004, she joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor of Pathology and an Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center. In 2008, she moved to Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and in 2012, she became the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Dr. Wagers is currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist and is a past recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, the Smith Family New Investigator Award, and the Keck Foundation Young Scholars Award. Her current research focuses on defining the factors and mechanisms that regulate the migration, expansion, and regenerative potential of adult blood-forming and muscle-forming stem cells.
Christine Wells, Ph.D.Associate Editor Professor Christine Wells is the Director of the University of Melbourne Centre for Stem Cell Systems. She is the Deputy Program Lead for Stem Cells Australia, an Australian-Research-Council-funded $24M special research initiative that brings together leading Australian stem cell scientists. She graduated from the University of QLD in 2004 (Ph.D.), and over the following 15 years has worked with international consortia including FANTOM (RIKEN, Japan), Functional Glycomics (USA), Project Grandiose (Canada), and Leukomics (UK).
Christine is a systems biologist interested in tissue injury and repair. She leads a program of research in biological data integration and visualization, including method development leading to gene discovery and characterization of stem cell subsets and innate immune cells. Christine was the first to discover a role for the C-type lectin Mincle in host responses to infection, and she has since characterized a role for Mincle in ischemic injury. She has published over 110 scientific journal articles in the leading scientific literature, including landmark studies mapping gene architecture and function. She has developed several open source software programs, including the Stemformatics.org stem cell collaboration resource, which has a global audience and hosts a large compendium of curated stem cell data. This resource is used to generate definitive molecular signatures of stem cell subsets and their differentiated progeny, benchmark in vitro differentiated stem cell products, and compare stem cell derivation methods, including reprogrammed and naïve culture conditions.
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