Making Our Body

Human reproduction is very inefficient. It is estimated that only 30% of all conceptions make it to a live birth. However, the reasons behind early pregnancy loss remain very poorly understood. In this talk, Dr Shahbazi will discuss novel methodologies that allow us to study human embryos in the laboratory and recreate human embryogenesis using stem cells. These cutting-edge techniques promise to shed light on the first stages of our development and tackle the issue of pregnancy loss.

Courtney Hanna did her Ph.D. in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia studying the aetiology of recurrent miscarriage. In 2013, she moved to Cambridge to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the Babraham Institute, investigating epigenetic programming in oogenesis. In 2018, Courtney undertook a semi-independent Next Generation Fellowship from the Centre for Trophoblast research to study epigenetic programming in the placenta. In 2021, she established her research group as a Sir Henry Dale Fellow in the Centre for Trophoblast Research and Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Her research group uses multi-omics sequencing approaches, developmental biology, and mouse genetics to investigate the molecular mechanisms regulating early placental development.