Rewarding Excellence – Awardees at TMM2016

by Camila Londono | Oct 26, 2016

The feature session of the fifth Till & McCulloch Meetings shone a light on two fantastic researchers, Huijuan Yang and Molly Shoichet, both of whom received awards for their outstanding work. Huijuan Yang, a PhD student in the Nagy lab at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum...

Stem cell regulatory networks, dynamics and ways to engineer them (Day 1, TMM2016)

by Hamideh Emrani | Oct 25, 2016

This year’s Till & McCulloch Meetings (TMM2016) began with a diverse set of topics organized into three different plenary sessions. The first session, on regulatory networks in stem cells, began with Sara-Jane Dunn from Microsoft Research who introduced us to “The...

Challenging assumptions to expand our thinking? Insights from Session 1 of TMM2016

by Camila Londono | Oct 25, 2016

The fifth Till & McCulloch Meetings started off with a bang, with an incredibly exciting and provocative talk by Dr. Sara-Jane Dunn that highlighted the predictive power of Boolean network models. Dr. Dunn, who works at Microsoft Research, introduced the idea of...

Right Turn: Finding a treatment for vision loss is looking up

by Stacey Johnson | Oct 21, 2016

October 13, 2016 was World Sight Day and the month of October is dedicated to blindness and vision loss awareness. No doubt that is why the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) recently shared the third installment in its Stem Cells in Your Face...

Sculpted to a T: Synthetic T-cells for a more controlled immune response

by Holly Wobma | Oct 18, 2016

I have a confession.  This is not a blog about stem cells. It is, however, a blog about cells with infinite possibilities of fate. Because we are entering the world of synthetic biology, where crafty cellular engineering has enabled a new level of control over immune...

STEMinism: Chasing diversity and equality in STEM

by Camila Londono | Oct 14, 2016

On October 11 I attended SHE DID THAT, the Ada Lovelace event, held at the University of Toronto, that Samantha Payne wrote about in Signals earlier this week. It was an exciting evening that not only celebrated incredible women in science, but also served as a...

Ada Lovelace Day: celebrating women in STEM

by Samantha Payne | Oct 11, 2016

Can you name five historically influential women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and medicine)? What about three? I recently asked myself this question and found that I struggled to come up with names, despite the formal training I’ve received in...

Right Turn: Finding donors for multi-ethnic patients with rare blood diseases

by Guest | Oct 7, 2016

Laine Jaremey is the Communications Specialist at CCRM. Laine has over eight years of experience as a strategic communicator with a focus in the health industry. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a...

Would you buy a designer bag made from lab-grown human skin?

by Jovana Drinjakovic | Oct 6, 2016

In case you haven’t heard, Tina Gorjanc, a UK-based fashion designer, shocked the fashion world this summer when she announced her Pure Human collection of luxury leather items, to be made from lab-grown human skin, engineered with the late designer Alexander...

Right Turn: “Comic” twist on CRISPR

by Lisa Willemse | Sep 30, 2016

There’s nothing really funny about the patent debate on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. It’s been a contentious and expensive court battle, that has thankfully steered clear of mud-slinging (mostly). Which is good, since there’s more than enough of that in the U.S. these...