Franchesca D. Houghton DPhil, PhD

Dr. Houghton became fascinated with Developmental Biology during her undergraduate Biomedical Sciences degree. This led her to pursue a DPhil in embryo metabolism at the University of York under the supervision of Prof. Henry Leese. She then took up a Post-Doctoral position with Prof. Gerald Kidder at the University of Western Ontario, Canada where she studied the assembly and role of gap junctions in development. Dr. Houghton returned to the University of York for further Post-Doctoral studies before being awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship entitled Nutrition of the mammalian preimplantation embryo which facilitated the establishment of her own research group. In 2006, Dr. Houghton was appointed to a lectureship in the Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Southampton before being promoted to Associate Professor in 2008, and her research expanded into the pluripotent stem cell field. Pluripotent stem cells namely, human embryonic stem cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells proliferate by self-renewal and have the potential to differentiate into all cells of the body. As well as studying mechanisms that regulate self-renewal, Dr. Houghton’s group is also investigating the regenerative medicine potential of pluripotent stem cells and in particular cartilage tissue generation.