BIO

Ivana Barbaric completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2006. She then joined Professor Peter Andrews’ group at the University of Sheffield to study the mechanisms that underlie human pluripotent stem cell fate. In 2013, Ivana was awarded a Wellcome Trust discipline hopping fellowship to engineer controlled microenvironments in order to understand mechanical and chemical cues influencing stem cell fate. She was appointed to a Group Leader position at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology, University of Sheffield in 2014. Her research is focused on investigating the causes and consequences of genetic changes in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), and studying how signals from the stem cells microenvironment affect their fate decisions and patterning. Her group is also developing protocols for production of differentiated cells from hPSCs for uses in regenerative medicine.