个人简介

In 2006, I completed my PhD with Dr. Greg Kelly from The University of Western Ontario, Canada. My thesis research examined how murine stem cells make the decision to differentiate into cells/tissues that make up the extra-embryonic structures that sustain the early embryo. The outcome of my research demonstrated that the cytoskeleton played a pivotal role in early fate specification, which was not widely accepted at the time, but this concept has gained significant traction within the scientific community. In 2006, I was recruited to Dr. Derrick Rancourt’s laboratory at the U of C to pursue postdoctoral. My work demonstrated the usefulness of mouse and human embryonic stem cells for regenerative medicine approaches in bone and cartilage tissue engineering. Within my current appointment at the University of Calgary, I have investigated the role of synovial mesenchymal stem cells (sMSCs) in normal joints, osteoarthritis (OA) and Rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Working closely with the Southern Alberta Tissue Donation and Transplantation program, orthopaedic surgeons and Rheumatologists my group has derived and characterized the chondrogenic potential and genome wide expression profiles from a number of individuals. We have identified an abnormal phenotype in stem cells derived from patients with arthritis including those with arthroscopically diagnosed early OA. Furthermore, we have identified specific inflammatory cytokines within OA synovial fluid that can reproduce the arthritic stem cell phenotype in normal sMSCs