The Stem Cell Podcast

Priye Iworima is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia. Her project is focused on developing and optimizing a differentiation protocol for generating insulin-producing cells derived from stem cells that could be used as a potential therapy for type 1 diabetes.

Dr. Kacey Ronaldson-Bouchard is an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University focusing on biomedical engineering. She is also the co-founder of TARA Biosystems, which offers physiologically relevant human “heart-on-a-chip” tissue models for cardiac risk assessment and drug discovery applications.

Dr. Todd McDevitt is a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and a Program Director and Professor at UCSF. His research focuses on engineering 3D, multicellular systems that can be used to study principles of stem cell and developmental biology.

Dr. Nicole Quinn is the Associate Director of Scientific Communications at STEMCELL Technologies, and one of the people hard at work behind the scenes of the Stem Cell Podcast. After completing her PhD in genomics and discovering her love of communicating science, Nicole left the bench to pursue a science communications career in the biotech industry.

Dr. Camilla Forsberg is the Co-Director of the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells, and a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her lab seeks to understand the molecular determinants of hematopoietic stem cell fate decisions.

Dr. Peter Zandstra is the Director of the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. His lab applyies engineering design principles, computational modeling, and fundamental stem cell biology to study the mechanisms that control stem cell fate, and to develop technologies for the propagation of stem cells and their derivatives.

Dr. Celina Juliano is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. Her lab studies development and regeneration in the aquatic animal Hydra, which undergoes continual self-renewal, lacks senescence and has incredible regenerative capabilities.

Dr. Rameen Shakur is a Jansen Fellow in Cardiology and Personalized Medicine at the Koch Institute for Integrative Science at MIT, and the Founder of the medical device and algorithm company Cambridge Heartwear Ltd.

Dr. Stephane Angers is a Professor at the University of Toronto. He is an expert in the field of signal transduction, working to understand the signaling mechanisms underlying the Wnt and Hedgehog families of growth factors and the large family of G protein-coupled receptors.

Dr. Paul Burridge from Northwestern University talks about his work using human iPSCs to model cardiomyopathy and heart failure.