Dr. Sara Wickström is the Sigrid Juselius Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Helsinki. Her group has uncovered how the generation of cellular forces is important for controlling stem cell fate and coordinating cell fate with cell position within the tissue. They also discovered how extrinsic forces generated by the tissue impact chromatin structure and epigenetic gene silencing, thereby controlling the transcriptional state and lineage commitment of stem cells. She was recently appointed as a new director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine.

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