Christine Mummery is Professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC). She trained in Biophysics at the University of London,  joined  the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht as a postdoctoral fellow, later becoming group leader and Professor of Developmental Biology.  After a sabbatical at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in 2007, she introduced human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) to the Netherlands. In 2008, she became Chair of Developmental Biology at the LUMC and department head from 2009-2020. In 2010, she co-founded NCardia bv.

Her current research concerns developing  cardiovascular disease models for safety pharmacology and target discovery. This research is supported by multiple large grants including an NWO Gravity award, ERC Advanced and Proof-of-Concept grants and most recently, a Novo Nordisk Foundation funded project, reNEW, which links centres at the LUMC, Copenhagen University and Melbourne Children’s Research Institute to advance regenerative medicine and drug discovery using stem cells. She co-founded the European Organ on Chip Society and the Netherlands Human Disease Modelling Technology organisation (hDMT.technology). She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science , was president of the International Society of Stem Cell research (ISSCR) 2020-2021 and founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports. She is on several scientific advisory boards including the Hubrecht-, Gurdon- and Allen Institutes, Mogrify, Angios-bio and Sartorius Gmbh.

„Human stem cells are providing unprecedented opportunities to understand how organs develop and which molecular pathways are disrupted in congenital- and other diseases. Cardiac organoids from pluripotent stem cells uniquely capture this for the human heart: what better time to start using these models to the full, than now“