Laura Kerosuo, Ph.D.

Dr. Laura Kerosuo received her Ph.D. in stem cell biology from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She then continued as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology where she initiated her research on stem cell characteristics of the neural crest in the laboratory of Professor Marianne Bronner. Her postdoctoral work demonstrated that neural crest cells, despite their transient nature, maintain a transient stem cell niche of self-renewing cells with a pluripotent gene expression signature located in the dorsal neural tube. Dr. Kerosuo made this discovery by creating novel techniques such as developing crestospheres, an in vitro method to maintain primary neural crest stem cells in a self-renewing state, as well as, in collaboration with biophysicists, developed single cell Multiplex Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis (scMST), which allows transcriptional profiling of segmented cells in their original spatial context in 3D. By studying fate choices during early neural crest specification, she has also proposed a hypothesis for onset of neuroblastoma at a much earlier time point than previously assumed. Based on these findings, Dr. Kerosuo established her lab at NIDCR in July 2018 and continues to pursue research on the molecular mechanisms of early neural crest development and how defects in the process cause disease. The lab has recently discovered novel functions by which the entire ectoderm is maintained in a pluripotent-like state, which challenges the dogma of gastrulation and enables the exceptionally high neural crest stem cell potency to form, as well regulatory details on ectodermal patterning both transcriptionally as well as by post-translational mechanisms.