Dr Silvia Ruzittu

Role: PhD Student

Nationality: Italian

Research Project Title: Liver-to-pancreas lineage reprogramming

Core Expertise: Lineage Reprogramming, hepatocytes, transcriptional regulation

I did my Master studies in Medical Biotechnologies at the University of Padua, Italy. During my undergraduate training, I applied the iPSCs technology to model rare monogenic diseases. To further explore the exciting field of stem cells and developmental biology, I joined Dr Spagnoli’s lab as a PhD student in 2015.

I moved with the Spagnoli’s lab from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin to King’s College London. I’m interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying pancreatic cell identity and plasticity in mammalian species. My research project aims at defining direct lineage reprogramming strategies to generate therapeutic pancreatic cells from different somatic cell types.