Samantha A. Morris PhD

Samantha Morris, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Departments of Genetics and Developmental Biology at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, is focused on understanding how cell identity can be manipulated via direct lineage reprogramming. She is leveraging her expertise in developmental biology to create new technologies that assess cell identity and ancestry throughout differentiation, at single-cell resolution. In combination with innovative transcription factor binding assays, Samantha aims to elucidate the molecular mechanisms driving cell fate conversion toward fully defined and functional cell types in order to generate cells that can improve understanding of developmental mechanisms as well as be used for cellular therapies for damaged or dysfunctional tissues.

Samantha Morris is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Genetics, and Developmental Biology at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, USA. As a postdoctoral fellow with Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz in Cambridge, UK, her work on early mammalian cell fate plasticity spurred an interest in manipulating cell fate for therapeutic purposes. In pursuit of this, Samantha joined the laboratory of George Daley at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she focused on the computational analysis of gene regulatory networks to dissect and engineer cell identity. Samantha joined the Departments of Genetics, and Developmental Biology at WashU in July 2015 with a continued interest in engineering clinically relevant cell populations and translating new insights in cell fate specification into better models of disease and development.