• Steven Jackson, Ph.D., postdoctoral training award recipient, and his mentor, Rupa Sridharan, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell and regenerative biology and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
• Jared Carlson-Stevermer, B.S., graduate training award recipient, and his mentor, Kris Saha, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. 
• Andrew Petersen, Ph.D., postdoctoral training award recipient, and his mentor, Su-Chun Zhang, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience and Waisman Center.
• Fima Zaltsman, B.S., graduate training award recipient, and his mentor, Laura Kiessling, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and biochemistry. 

The SCRMC Education Committee and WiSCR Chair Jayne Squirrell, Ph.D., would like to express their thanks to the SCRMC members who carefully and thoughtfully reviewed the applications. (Images by S. Gilbert)

Also called Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS causes paralysis and death. According to the ALS Association, as many as 30,000 Americans are living with ALS.

The new method, described in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, could be used to generate large numbers of muscle cells and muscle progenitors directly from human pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells, such as embryonic (ES) or induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, can be made into virtually any adult cell in the body.

Stem cells are cells that can form many types of cells in the body, and that makes them inherently promising - and dangerous. "Stem cell tourism" refers to people traveling, both within the U.S. and abroad, in pursuit of advertised stem cell therapies to purportedly treat a variety of medical conditions.

Tuesday stem cell meetings run through May 6

Justin Williams, Ph.D., left, joins SCRMC Co-Director Bill Murphy, Ph.D., at the April 1 meeting of the SCRMC Weekly Campus Seminar Series. An associated professor of biomedical engineering, Williams was the invited speaker choice of the Wisconsin Stem Cell Roundtable (WiSCR), a graduate student and postdoctoral trainee organization proudly supported by the SCRMC. He spoke on emerging engineering technologies used to interface with the nervous system.