Sophie Morgani

Sophie is originally from the UK. She completed her PhD in the lab of Prof. Joshua Brickman at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the Danish Stem Cell Centre (Copenhagen, Denmark), where she determined how signals drive the early pluripotent cells of the embryo to make one cell type versus another. Following on from this, she did a joint post-doc in the labs of Prof. Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis, in the Developmental Biology Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (NY, USA), and Prof. Jennifer Nichols, at the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, Cambridge University (UK). During this time, she established in vitro organoid systems and transgenic mouse lines to study not only how different cell types are made, but also how they are simultaneously patterned into functional tissues. Currently, in the Leucht lab in the Orthopedic Department, NYU Langone, New York, she is investigating how skeletal progenitor cell fate decisions of the are altered during aging and how this contributes to bone degeneration.