Meetings

Thor visited snowy Montreal January 29-31, 2025, to present our latest work at two world-class institutions. Thanks, Will Pastor, for hosting me at McGill Biochemistry and Serge McGraw for hosting me at CHU Sainte-Justine. It was inspiring to see the exciting stem cell research being done in Quebec. Je vous remercie de m’avoir invité!

Seminar at CHU Sainte-Justine:

Dinner with Alex Dubrac, Serge McGraw, and Anthony Flamier (a fellow Jaenisch lab alum):

Group photo with the Pastor lab (sans Will):

Thor visited Beijing from October 19-25, 2024 to speak at the 6th Symposia on Frontiers in Reproductive Biology (SFRB 2024) organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also presented a seminar in the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University upon invitation of Professor Wei Xie.

Photos from the SFRB Symposium with Jose Silva (Guangzhou), Peter Rugg-Gunn (Babraham), Josh Brickman (Copenhagen), and Shuhan Cheng (CAS Beijing):

Together with SFRB Co-Host Hongmei Wang (CAS Beijing):

Photos from Thor’s visit to Tsinghua University with Wei Xie, Xianle Shi, and Fan Zhou (together with his lab) :

Dinner with fellow Jaenisch lab alumni Haoyi Wang and Albert Cheng:

Shuhan Cheng kindly provided a tour of the research facilities at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Thor and our new postdoc Kong:

Visiting the Forbidden City:

More information about SFRB 2024: https://sfrb2024.scimeeting.cn/en/web/index/21753

Seminar announcement at Tsinghua: https://life.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1132/6252.htm

Thor presented our latest studies on modeling human embryo and placenta development using naive stem cells at Cell Symposia: Engineering development and disease in organoids in San Diego, California, August 19-21, 2024. Please check out the meeting program here.

Joey Zemke and Rowan Karvas presented their latest work at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction (SSR) in Dublin, Ireland, from July 16-19, 2024. Joey gave a poster presentation on the signaling pathways driving human placental development, while Rowan presented insights from her 3D-cultured blastoid model in the trophoblast focus session. Well done Joey and Rowan!

Laura Fischer presented her studies on tracking and mitigating imprint erasure during induction of naive human pluripotency in the Concurrent Session on Imaging Stem Cell Systems Across Scales at the ISSCR Annual Meeting in Hamburg, Germany, on Thursday, July 11, 2024. Way to go Laura!