Biography

Meri Firpo is an Assistant Professor in the Stem Cell Institute and the Schulze Diabetes Institute at the University of Minnesota, where she works on human pluripotent stem cell biology, and transplantation therapies for diabetes. 
She received her undergraduate degree from Carroll College in Helena, Montana, and her Ph.D. from the Cornell University Medical College Graduate School of Medical Sciences after completing a research project in the Developmental Hematopoiesis Laboratory at the Sloan Kettering Institute.  Her research at the Sloan Kettering Institute was focused on adult bone marrow stem cells.  She then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Jewish Institute for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, Colorado, where she completed a project on generating hematopoietic stem cells from mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells in culture.  After returning to the Bay Area, Dr. Firpo did a second postdoctoral fellowship at the DNAX Research Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology in Palo Alto, California, where she studied the development of the human blood-forming system and human models of leukemia.  Dr. Firpo went to the University of California San Francisco, where she directed the derivation of two of the first human ES cell lines. She has also derived new lines suitable for transplantation therapies using human feeder cells. 

When Dr. Firpo moved to Minnesota, she transitioned much of her efforts to using human pluripotent stem cells derived from patient skin, and is working with these cells as a model of human pancreas development and diabetes disease progression.  Her lab is currently differentiating human stem cells into functional tissues for transplantation therapies for diabetes.