April CraftDr. April Craft is an Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery & Research at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Her research focuses on both developmental biology and traslational medicine, and involves the use of pluripotent stem cells to understand how articular chondrocytes and cartilage tissues are specified during embryonic development and to generate appropriate cells and tissues for repair. April Craft received her Bachelor of Science cum laude from Westminster College (New Wilmington, PA) and her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (Pittsburgh, PA). She completed her doctoral thesis in the gene therapy-based laboratory of Dr. Joseph Glorioso where she engineered non-toxic viral vectors suitable for gene expression in stem cells, and developed viral replication-based functional genomics platforms to screen for genes that activate developmental programs. During her post-doctoral studies in Dr. Gordon Keller's laboratory at the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine (Toronto, Canada), she developed methods to reliably and reproducibly generate both articular and growth plate-like cartilage from mouse and human pluripotent stem cells. She accomplished this by recapitulating the developmental events that contribute to the specification of these tissues in utero, an approach that resulted in cartilaginous cells and tissues that are both molecularly and functionally distinct. Dr. Craft is currently an Assistant Professor at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where her laboratory continues to study the development of cartilage and other synovial joint tissues with hopes of applying this knowledge toward the development of therapeutics for disease attenuation and tissue regeneration and repair. Read More Read Less