The ISSCR Announces New Stem Cell Reports Early Career Editorial Board
Skokie, IL – The ISSCR has selected 10 distinguished early career scientists to serve on the first Stem Cell Reports Early Career Editorial Board (ECEB). Stem Cell Reports is the peer-reviewed, open access, online journal of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).
Throughout the next two years, the members of the ECEB will provide strategic advice, participate in the editorial review process, and receive mentorship from current editors. The society selected the ECEB members through a competitive application process. The 10 inaugural members are:
Katie Galloway, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
Mingxia Gu, Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, USA
Kai Kretzschmar, University Hospital Würzburg, Germany
Nathan Palpant, The University of Queensland, Australia
Nika Shakiba, University of British Columbia, Canada
Yue Shao, Tsinghua University, China
Yonatan Stelzer, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Thor Theunissen, Washington University School of Medicine, USA
Nan Yang, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), USA
Pengyi Yang, University of Sydney, Australia
Stem Cell Reports is an open access forum communicating basic discoveries in stem cell research, in addition to translational and clinical studies. Stem Cell Reports focuses on that report original research with conceptual or practical advances that are of broad interest to stem cell biologists and clinicians. Stem Cell Reports and the ISSCR is committed to inclusivity and diversity and to creating a welcoming environment that embraces unique perspectives and that encourages the participation of all people.
More about the Stem Cell Reports ECEB members:
Katie Galloway, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
Katie Galloway is the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on elucidating the fundamental principles of integrating synthetic circuitry to drive cellular behaviors. Through a combination of systems and synthetic biology approaches, her lab develops integrated gene circuits and elucidates the systems-level principles that govern complex cellular behaviors. Her goal is to leverage quantitative tools to transform how we understand cellular transitions and engineer cellular therapies. Galloway earned a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and a BS in Chemical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. She completed her postdoctoral work at University of Southern California (USC) Stem Cell. Her research has been featured in Science, Cell Stem Cell, Cell Systems, and Development. She has won multiple fellowships and awards including the NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award R35, the NIH F32, and Caltech’s Everhart Award.
Mingxia Gu, Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, USA
Dr. Mingxia Gu is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She completed her training at Peking University and Stanford University. The Gu lab utilizes patient-specific iPSC-derived organoid models to study the role of vascular deficiency in the etiology of heart, lung, and brain diseases. Recent efforts have primarily focused on generating vascularized heart, lung, and brain organoids to better understand cell-cell communication during development and disease. The Gu lab is also developing a high-throughput drug screening platform and machine learning algorithm to identify compounds that reverse the fundamental pathobiology of the disease in a personalized manner.
Kai Kretzschmar, University Hospital Würzburg, Germany
Kai studied biology at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in Germany and received his PhD in genetics from the University of Cambridge in the UK. During his PhD studies with Fiona Watt, he investigated the role of b-catenin in skin epidermis during adult homeostasis and cancer. As postdoc with Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht in the Netherlands, Kai worked on projects focused on adult stem cells in tissue regeneration and cancer and developed novel organoid models for skin epidermis and immuno-oncology. Since 2020, he is junior group leader at the Mildred Scheel Early Career Centre (MSNZ) for Cancer Research Würzburg in Germany, a joint venture of the University Hospital and University of Würzburg initiated by a grant from the German Cancer Aid. His research is focused on the role of the adult stem cells and their niche in head and neck cancer. To study the stem cell niches, his group applies different approaches including genetic lineage tracing, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and organoid technology. In 2022, he received a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant to fund his research.
Nathan Palpant, The University of Queensland, Australia
Associate Professor Nathan Palpant is a Group Leader at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). After completing PhD training at the University of Michigan and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, he established his independent research group at the IMB in 2015 focusing on fundamental mechanisms of cell differentiation with a particular interest in cardiovascular development and disease. He has received numerous awards including the Lorne Genome Millennium Science Award, the International Society for Heart Research Young Investigator Award, and Fellowships from the American and Australian National Heart Foundations. His research has received international media attention including articles in the New York Times, The Guarding, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. Dr. Palpant is co-founder of Infensa Bioscience, aiming to advance ASIC1a inhibitors into clinical testing for ischemic heart disease and stroke.
Nika Shakiba, University of British Columbia, Canada
Nika Shakiba is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia and an Allen Distinguished Investigator. She received her B.A.Sc. from the Engineering Science program, and subsequently completed a Ph.D. in stem cell bioengineering under the supervision of Dr. Peter Zandstra at the University of Toronto. She conducted her postdoctoral training under the co-supervision of Dr. Ron Weiss and Dr. Domitilla Del Vecchio in the Synthetic Biology Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her training trajectory has instilled in her a scientific philosophy that is rooted in interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations. Her independent research program is interested in the “social lives” of pluripotent stem cells: how these cells interact to influence one another’s survival and cell fate decisions, both in culture and embryonic development. Her lab uses systems and synthetic biology to understand the genetic rules that encode cooperative and competitive interactions between stem cells. Leveraging genetic engineering, her lab seeks to program these interactions to drive predictable growth and differentiation outcomes and enable robust bioprocesses for manufacturing stem cell-derived cell therapies.
Dr. Shakiba is also committed to training the next generation of biomedical researchers with core expertise that span life sciences and engineering. These scientific leaders will have the know-how to develop cutting-edge technologies, serve as nodes for interdisciplinary collaboration, and tackle fundamental scientific questions. She has co-developed a national workshop brining synthetic biology to stem cell trainees in the Canadian Stem Cell Network. Beyond her research and teaching, Dr. Shakiba has been actively involved in science communication and outreach, bringing the science and ethics of stem cell research to the general public and youth. She is also passionate about providing equity in mentorship and multi-directional advice-sharing through her latest project, Advice to a Scientist.
Yonatan Stelzer, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Dr. Selzer is the incumbent of the Louis and Ida Rich Career Development Chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Yonatan received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel under the supervision of Prof. Nissim Benvenisty. In 2014, Yonatan joined the laboratory of Prof. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute of MIT as a postdoctoral fellow. He established his independent lab at the Weizmann Institute in 2017. His lab utilizes single-cell genomics, pluripotent stem cells, transgenics, and genome editing to study how cell-specific epigenetic programs are established in the early embryo and orchestrate cell state and function.
Thor Theunissen, Washington University School of Medicine, USA
Thor grew up in the Netherlands and received his A.B. in biology from Harvard University in 2007. He became interested in stem cells and developmental biology during his undergraduate work in the laboratories of Christine Mummery (Hubrecht Institute) and Stuart Orkin (Harvard Medical School). He completed his graduate studies in José Silva’s laboratory in the Wellcome Trust Center for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge in 2011. His doctoral thesis focused on the role of the homeodomain transcription factor Nanog in epigenetic reprogramming. As a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in Rudolf Jaenisch’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute/MIT, Thor developed methods to isolate naïve human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). He was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and Center of Regenerative Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in 2017. The Theunissen lab explores the molecular regulation of distinct hPSC states and their applications in regenerative medicine, with a particular focus on modeling human trophoblast development using naïve hPSCs. Thor is a recipient of the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2), the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr New Investigator Award, and the Shipley Foundation’s Program for Innovation in Stem Cell Science Award.
Nan Yang, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), USA
Nan Yang, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai. She established her independent laboratory in the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at Mount Sinai in 2017 after completing post-doctoral training at Stanford University, where she pioneered technologies for lineage conversion of somatic cells. Dr. Yang’s research combines expertise in stem cells, genomic engineering, and neuroscience to identify the mechanisms that underlie brain disease and discover new therapeutic opportunities. Dr. Yang’s current research focus lies in resolving the convergence of the many risk variants linked to disease with the goal of clarifying pathobiology and advancing therapeutics.
Pengyi Yang, University of Sydney, Australia
Pengyi Yang is an Associate Professor at The University of Sydney and Laboratory Head of Computational Systems Biology at the Children’s Medical Research Institute, Sydney, Australia. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Southwest University, China, and his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from The University of Sydney, Australia. He worked as a Research Fellow in Systems Biology at National Institutes of Health, USA, and subsequently joined the School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Sydney, as a tenured faculty member to establish his research program, specializing in developing machine learning and statistical models for characterizing molecular networks underlying cell identity and cell-fate decisions. Leveraging the advances in single-cell omics technologies, his lab combines computational and experimental approaches to study stem cell differentiation and embryogenesis, and to improve efficiency and efficacy of brain and retina organoid derivation. He has received multiple awards including the Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council, the Investigator Award from the National Health of Medical Research Council, the J G Russell Award from the Australian Academy of Science, and the Metcalf Prize for Stem Cell Research from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia.
Yue Shao, Tsinghua University, China
Dr. Shao received a B.E. degree (2008) and a M.E. degree (2011) from Tsinghua University, both in Engineering Mechanics. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan (UMICH) in 2017 for thesis completed with Dr. Jianping Fu. Dr. Shao conducted his postdoctoral research in Dr. Jianping Fu’s group (2017) at UMICH and then in Dr. Robert Langer’s group (2017-2019) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Shao has been at Tsinghua University in the Department of Engineering Mechanics, Institute of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering from 2019 to the present.
Dr. Shao’s research focuses on integrating engineering tools with stem cells to advance human reproductive medicine and organ repair / regeneration, aiming to answer calls from the humanity as a whole that faces inevitable challenges on reproductive health and overall health span in its paths towards an aging society. To study how humans develop, he has been working on stem cell-based embryo and organ models, witnessed by the rising field of synthetic embryology. To lend extra hands to control stem cell fate, function, and organizations, he also works on mechanics-driven stem cell technologies and basic mechanobiology, advocating a new trend towards multiscale, multimodal stem cell engineering for high-fidelity embryo and organ models as well as translational stem cell therapies.
Dr. Shao has made significant contributions to multiple research areas, including stem cell engineering, embryo and organ engineering, mechanobiology, and physics of active matters. His work has been recognized by more than 20 institutional, national, and international awards and honors, including the 35 Innovators Under 35 China from MIT Technology Review (2020), Young Scientist Award from the Microsystems and Nanoengineering International Summit (2020), Post-doctoral Fellow Shooting Star Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (2018).
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