Only 23 percent of biomedical PhD holders eventually land tenure-track faculty positions, according to a report by the National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Workforce Working Group. Beating these odds, six postdoctoral trainees from USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine recently landed coveted jobs as tenure-track assistant professors: Lori O’Brien at the …

Some students sell blood plasma to make extra cash during graduate school. Thomas Lozito, a new professor of orthopaedic surgery and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at USC, sold poison dart frogs to ward off the impecunity of the PhD years. “When I was in high school and all the way up to graduate …

For the first time ever, the City of Los Angeles hosted the world’s largest stem cell conference. By choosing Los Angeles as the host city for this major annual meeting, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) acknowledged the city’s growing importance as a hub for the biosciences, as well as the world-class research …

Have you ever wondered how a scientific discovery in the laboratory becomes a new medical treatment for patients in the hospital? At the public symposium “Bringing Stem Cells to Patients – Treating Age-Related Blindness,” students, families, patients and local community members gathered on the lawn outside of USC’s stem cell research center to learn about …

Science was the common language at the first France-USA Stem Cell Symposium, held at the Eli and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC. The event brought together over 100 stem cell scientists from France and the United States on the eve of the field’s largest annual conference—the International …

In her new lab, Min Yu observed the eerie predictability of a line of human breast cancer cells. First in one mouse, then in many, the cells metastasized again and again to the same vital organ: the brain. Alarmed, Yu telephoned the oncologist who had collected the cells from a patient. Yu learned that the …

When Denis Evseenko was still a student at Novosibirsk State Medical University in southern Siberia, he began pondering the meaning of life. “I was reading a lot of philosophic things [saying that] everything is pointless because you will die,” he said. “And the only one thing that makes it not completely pointless is that you …

Growing stem cells isn’t just something junior faculty do in the lab. Eight of the junior faculty in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine recently welcomed new babies into their families—more than half of them within the past year. Here, our junior faculty parents share their joy and wisdom about balancing career …

As a young oral surgeon in China, Yang Chai often operated on babies born with cleft lips or palates. “You talk to the parents, and they were very emotional and trying find out why their kid got this cleft palate or other malformation in the face,” he said. “You can tell them all the statistics—one …

How do bones heal, and how could they heal better? The answer to these questions may lie in a newly discovered population of “messenger” cells, according to a recent USC Stem Cell study published in the journal eLife. “With nearly half a million patients in the U.S experiencing failed bone repair every year, stimulating these …

Cells should be treated as individuals, according to the scientists who presented research at the Junior Faculty Candidate Mini-symposium, hosted by USC’s Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine on February 5. While cells have traditionally been evaluated as populations, these up-and-coming scientists shared their frontier approaches for studying the specific features and activities …

Giorgia Quadrato loves a good challenge. That’s why USC’s newest assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine currently spends her time growing 3D networks of human nerve cells, called brain organoids, in the laboratory. “I think studying the brain is, by definition, probably one of the most challenging fields of study,” she said. …

What causes joints to age, lose their regenerative capacity and succumb to arthritis, and how can we slow this process? To address these questions, the National Institutes of Health have awarded a $1.69 million research project grant to investigator Denis Evseenko, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the …

When it comes to sorting cells or other small particles, there’s no better place to do so than USC. The university’s Flow Cytometry Facility recently acquired two top-of-the-line cell sorters, the BD FACSymphony and the BioRad S3e, thanks to generous support from several USC sources.

Bone marrow transplants, which involve transplanting healthy blood stem cells, offer the best treatment for many types of cancers, blood disorders and immune diseases. Even though 22,000 of these procedures are performed each year in the US, much remains to be understood about how they work.

Oihana Iriondo, the newest Broad Postdoctoral Fellow, has always been curious about how things work.

“The field of stem cell biology is one of our great convergence opportunities,” said USC Provost Michael Quick, addressing an audience of biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, clinicians and many others. This diverse group came together for the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Symposium, hosted by USC Stem Cell and the USC Medicine, Engineering, Science and Humanities (MESH) …

Children are not as hard-headed as adults—in a very literal sense. Babies are born with soft spots and flexible joints called sutures at the junctions where various sections of their skull bones meet. If these sutures fuse prematurely, the skull cannot expand to accommodate the child’s growing brain—a serious birth defect called craniosynostosis that can …

It didn’t require plane tickets to bring together scientists from USC Stem Cell in Los Angeles and BCRegMed in Vancouver. During October’s Virtual Symposium, videoconferencing technology enabled these scientists to share ideas as if they were sitting in the same conference room—even though they were more than 1,200 miles apart.

Every minute of every day, your organs are using a complex language to communicate with each other about the basic physiological processes necessary for life—everything from blood pressure regulation to pH balance to metabolism. To decipher this little-known language, USC Stem Cell scientist Andy McMahon has joined forces with top scientists at Harvard and Stanford …