SRF Post-Doctoral Prize Session
Paternal under and over-nutrition alters sperm RNA profile and in vitro embryo development in mice Hannah Morgan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Nottingham, UK
Dr Hannah Morgan is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Centre for Perinatal Research at the School of Medicine in the University of Nottingham. Hannah’s current research focuses on examining the how sub-optimal paternal diets influence reproduction, with particular focus on the impacts on early embryo development, implantation and placental development in a mouse model. Hannah graduated from the University of Newcastle with a BSc in Physiology before obtaining an MRes in Maternal and Fetal Health at the University of Manchester and obtained her PhD in Cardiovascular Sciences from University of Glasgow in 2018.
Beneficial effects of melatonin on canine oocyte nuclear maturation through reduction of oxidative stress, Fataneh Ghafari, Research Fellow, Royal Veterinary College, UK
SMAD4 within granulosa cells promotes adhesion of transzonal projections to the oocyte in the mouse Sofia Granados Aparici, Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University, Canada
Sofia Granados Aparici did her PhD thesis at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she studied how the TGFβ mediators, the SMADs, regulate primordial follicle activation and growth in the ovary (2013-2017). After that, she started a postdoctoral position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she continued her investigations about the SMADs in the context of oocyte-granulosa cell communication during preantral follicle development (2018-2021). She recently moved to Valencia, Spain, where she started a MSc in Bioinformatics and joined the University of Valencia/INCLIVA as postdoctoral researcher, where she develops artificial intelligence-based image analysis tools for healthy and pathological tissue.
Dynamics of extracellular vesicle based embryo-maternal communication in pre-implantation microenvironment Kasun Godakumara, Research Fellow, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Estonia
The repair of DNA double-strand breaks is deficient in human preimplantation embryos indicating that genome editing performed at early developmental stages may carry additional risks Nada Kubikova, Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford, UK
Nada is a reproductive biologist with interests in human genetics and infertility. Recently, she started investigating how genome editing technologies might be harnessed to shed light on the key processes underlying human preimplantation development, with special interest in DNA repair and genome instability. She completed her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2020 and had since been appointed a Maplethorpe Junior Research Fellow in Biomedical Sciences at Jesus College, Oxford.