Sophie Petropoulos

Sophie completed her PhD in the Department of Physiology at the University of Toronto with Prof. Stephen Matthews and then started her first postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Prof. Moshe Szyf, in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University. During this time, she focused on examining Epigenetics as an underlying mechanism of fetal programming, Cushing’s disease and Liver Cancer. In 2014, Sophie relocated to the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden in the Departments of Clinical Sciences, Intervention and Technology and Cellular and Molecular Biology and the Ludwig Cancer Institute. Here she was co-supervised by Drs. Rickard Sandberg and Fredrik Lanner and utilized single-cell genomics to unravel fundamental aspects of human preimplantation and stem cell biology. In 2017, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Karolinska Institutet, where she is still overseeing lab activities, and in July 2018 was recruited to the CRCHUM and the University of Montreal, Department of Medicine. She has merged 17 years of training expertise to formulate her unique research niche focused on human development, using cutting edge molecular biology techniques including single-cell genomic-sequencing (RNA, small noncoding RNA, methylation), single-molecule RNA FISH, imaging, phenotyping, in vitro and in vivo models, and bioinformatics. The overall goals of her innovative research program are to determine fundamental mechanism(s) underlying human embryo preimplantation development and to identify external factors that can reprogram the offspring’s life-trajectories manifesting as disease/disorders with ageing. Findings from her work can broadly be applied to stem cell biology and the improvement of Artificial Reproduction.