IN VITRO MODELS OF EMBRYO AND IMPLANTATION, ARE THEY REALLY USEFUL? - Discussion

Dr Mina Popovic is a geneticist and clinical embryologist. She is currently the Scientific Director of the Eugin Group in Barcelona, Spain and the coordinator of ESHRE’s Special Interest Group Stem Cells. Dr. Popovic completed her undergraduate studies in genetics and Masters in molecular biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD from Ghent University in Belgium, investigating the impact of chromosomal instability on early human development. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a clinical embryologist for over five years, at Genea (previously Sydney IVF) in Australia. Throughout her career she gained extensive experience in embryo genetics and preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), as well as modelling early human development and human stem cell biology.

Marta Shahbazi is a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). She obtained her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, and in 2014 she joined the laboratory of Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at the University of Cambridge to study mammalian embryo development at implantation. As a post-doctoral fellow, she developed a method to culture human embryos beyond implantation in vitro, and explore the consequences of aneuploidy for human embryo development. She joined the LMB in February 2020 to understand self-organization and developmental plasticity in mouse and human embryos. Photo courtesy of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology