Regenerative Medicine Current Lecture

The Beat Goes On: Using Cardiac Organoids to Study Heart Development and Disease

The Fall 2025 Regenerative ​Medicine Lecture will be presented as a webinar on Thursday, October 30^th at 6 pm. Registration is required to attend. Dr. Casey Gifford will be presenting this seminar.

Registration:

Registration is required to attend; following registration, you will receive a link to access the webinar. Register Here

Lecture Summary:

Understanding the genes that help form human organs is key to discovering the causes of birth defects. However, we still have many questions about the processes that occur after an embryo implants, known as gastrulation, because there aren't enough laboratory tools to study these stages effectively. In this talk, I will describe the laboratory methods we use to investigate the initial stages of heart development, which begins during gastrulation. Our goal is to combine this knowledge with advanced computational techniques to improve our ability to diagnose and treat congenital heart defects, which affect the hearts of about 1% of all infants. By enhancing our understanding of heart development, we aim to develop better technologies and treatments that could not only reduce the long-term healthcare costs associated with managing congenital heart defects but also significantly improve the quality of life for affected individuals.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Gifford received her BS in Biochemistry from Simmons University and earned her PhD from Harvard, where she studied how epigenetic mechanisms influence cell fate during embryonic development using human induced pluripotent stem cells. She then pursued postdoctoral studies at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, focusing on how genetic mutations disrupt heart development and contribute to cardiovascular disease. Dr. Gifford is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Genetics at Stanford School of Medicine, a member of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, a founding member of the BASE Initiative at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine.

Presented by the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the Center for Science and Math Success, the Regenerative Medicine Lectures are funded through a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) grant in collaboration with the UC Davis Stem Cell Program. This webinar is free and open to the public.

For questions or more information about the Regenerative Medicine Lecture series, contact Robin Altman at altman@csus.edu.