I came back to England to learn from two people about teratocarcinoma and about embryonic stem cells. One of them was somebody called Chris Graham at the University of Oxford who not only was working on mouse teratocarcinoma cells, but also on human teratocarcinoma cells. And I went to Martin Evans' lab when Robin Lovell-Badge, and Liz Robertson were postdocs there, they may have even been PhD students, and Martin told me everything about embryonic stem cells. I thought this was so incredibly cool that you could do these things with stem cells that I started it up in the lab in the Netherlands and we got funding to do some things and at this point we thought you could cure teratocarcinoma or neuroblastoma by making it differentiate. So, we were working on that and it actually was going quite well, except suddenly it was discovered that cis-platinum could actually cure teratocarcinoma. Now, if you're working on a tumor, there's nothing worse than somebody else actually curing it and without something you are working on. So, all cancer foundation grants stopped and we looked for something else.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.