Senem Simsek, Ph.D.

Senem Simsek received her BS degree in Biology from Hacettepe University and MSc degree in Biotechnology from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. During her doctoral training as a DAAD scholar, she joined A. Francis Stewart’s Genomics Department TU Dresden c/o International Max Planck Institute. She established an innovative conditional mutagenesis strategy to identify epigenetic networks that control differentiation and cell lineage commitment in mouse embryonic stem cells. She joined Assoc. Prof. Vladimir Zachar’s Laboratory of Stem Cell as a postdoctoral and lecturer fellow. Here she showed that the intersection of the Notch and Shh pathways with hypoxia pathways play a notable role in maintenance of pluripotency and self-renewal of human embryonic stem cells. She then worked in Dr. Shuibing Chen’s lab at Weill Cornell Medical College. Here she established a novel directed iPSC differentiation protocol for human pancreatic ductal epithelial cells in conjunction with a small molecule based screening system. She joined the Frazer lab in February 2017 where she will be involved in scaling existing protocols for deriving pancreatic precursor cells to enable 100 iPSCORE lines to be differentiated and subsequently analyzed using high throughput epigenetic assays.