Ina Dobrinski

Dr. Ina Dobrinski is Professor of Reproductive Biology in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. She joined the University of Calgary in 2008 after 11 years at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Professor of Reproduction, the Director of the Center for Animal Transgenesis and Germ Cell Research, and the Marion Dilley and Robert George Jones Chair in Reproduction.

Research in the Dobrinski laboratory is focused on mammalian germline stem cell biology. This lab was the first to establish germ cell transplantation in non-rodent models to transmit a genetic change introduced into germline stem cells to the next generation. The work enables generation of germline gene-edited non-rodent animal models. They also developed xenografting of testis tissue and cells as an accessible in vivo system to study germline stem cells and spermatogenesis. These approaches allow controlled experimentation in donor species such as primates where experiments in whole animals would be logistically and ethically difficult.

More recently, her group pioneered testicular organoid technology as a reproducible in vitro model for cell-cell interactions in the mammalian testis.