BioInsights talks to Prof. Christine Mummery, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Christine Mummery studied physics at the University of Nottingham, UK and has a PhD in Biophysics from the University of London. After positions and postdoc and tenured group leader at the Hubrecht Institute, she became professor at the UMC Utrecht in 2002. 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, drug discovery and future cardiac repair. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW), and board member of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR), the KNAW and the Netherlands Medical Research Council (ZonMW). She was recently awarded the Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives in research. She co-authored a popular book on stem cells “Stem Cells: scientific facts and Fiction” in 2011 (2nd edition 2014) and is editor in chief of the ISSCR journal Stem Cell Reports