Ashley Abel

Ashley Abel is a Ph.D. candidate in Genetics at Yale University and has been a member of Prof. Berna Sozen's lab since March 2021, entering Yale through the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. program in the fall of 2020. Ashley has been awarded both a NIH T32 Fellowship in Genetics and F31 NRSA Fellowship with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) during her graduate work. She is using human embryonic stem cells to model early developmental processes towards the goal of identifying causes of early pregnancy loss.

Prior to starting her graduate work at Yale, Ashley graduated from Seattle University as an Arrupe Scholar with a Bachelor of Science degree in Cell and Molecular Biology. As an undergraduate, Ashley researched in both the labs of Prof. Charles (Chuck) Murry and Prof. Ying Zheng at the University of Washington’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, during which she worked on engineering human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte models and in vitro aneurysm models. After college, Ashley worked as a research assistant at Brown University under Prof. Kareen Coulombe, where she worked on generating bioelectric sutures to improve stem cell derived-cardiomyocyte grafting on host tissue.