Brain organoids and regeneration are the main interests of Claudia Moroni, who was born in Switzerland and completed her master’s degree in Sweden.
Born in Switzerland, Claudia Moroni moved to Sweden to pursue a master’s degree in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet:
”I have loved neuroscience since the very beginning of my studies, and I have explored many different topics and domains within the field. Currently, I would say that I am particularly drawn to the field of neuroregeneration and in the development of 3D models of the nervous system. I think that the integration of iPSCs and organoids with advanced gene editing techniques holds immense potential for understanding and addressing complex neurological disorders. For my master’s thesis, I started to create a genetic fate map of proliferative cells following a spinal cord injury in adult mice. Using scRNAseq and 3D imaging techniques, we began characterizing scar formation across time and space. Through this project, I discovered that the CNS contains specific cells that proliferate after an injury, which sparked my growing interest in the field of regeneration,” Claudia explains.
Claudia is returning to academia after one year of working in the biomedical industry at Roche in Switzerland, and she is excited for the pre-PhD year where she will explore different techniques to prepare her for shaping a PhD project:
”I really appreciate the opportunity for moving through these lab rotations and meeting different PI’s before choosing a lab. My idea was to gain exposure to different techniques and integrate them into my future project. I do know that I would like to work with brain organoids, but that model offers a wide range of applications. So, I am hoping to apply them in advanced systems to address my future hypotheses," she says.
For her first rotation, Claudia will be in the lab of Professor Yonglun Luo at Aarhus University where she will learn the CRISPR gene editing technique and deepen her knowledge in bioinformatics and data analysis.