Affiliation: Lund University, Molecular Medicine and Gene Therapy, Lund Stem Cell Center

Dr. Leal Oburoglu completed her BSc in Biochemistry and her MSc in Immunology from Montpellier University in France. During her PhD at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier, she deciphered the roles of critical metabolites, glucose, and glutamine, in differentiating erythroid cells from human hematopoietic stem cells. She then pursued a postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, funded by an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship, where she focused on induced pluripotent stem cells and their differentiation towards hematopoietic lineages. She showed a crucial requirement for glutamine in developmental hematopoiesis and discovered that pyruvate metabolism is essential in specifying definitive hematopoietic cells during human embryonic development. She currently works as an Associate researcher at Lund University and her main aim is to understand how metabolic pathways influence cell fate decisions of stem cells during development.