Affiliation: Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics; Brigham and Women's Hospital, Department of Pathology

Margarete is a PhD student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program at Harvard Medical School, where she is a member of the Developmental and Regenerative Biology community. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, she came to the US to pursue her undergraduate studies at Columbia University in New York City. She received her BA in 2014, having completed a major in Biochemistry and a minor in Evolutionary Biology of the Human Species. While at Columbia, she spent four years in Dr. Martin Chalfie's laboratory investigating neuronal subtype differentiation in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Her research elucidated new mechanisms guiding neuronal outgrowth and polarity. As a graduate student in Dr. Olivier Pourquie's laboratory, she has developed in vitro systems for the recapitulation of the mammalian segmentation clock based on pluripotent stem cells. Her PhD work has resulted in the first live characterization of the human segmentation clock, an important contribution to human developmental biology. Margarete is also Director of the Research Experience for Peruvian Undergraduates (REPU) program, which seeks to increase the representation of Latin American students in scientific research. In the future, she hopes to continue an academic path with strong teaching and mentoring components.