Joanna Smeeton runs a lab at Columbia University that uses zebrafish to understand joint tissue regeneration and develop new approaches for treating ligament injuries and arthritis. But before receiving a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Scholars grant to pursue her postdoctoral training at USC, she had never worked with either zebrafish or joints.
“That training grant was instrumental to my career success,” said Smeeton, who is the H.K. Corning Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine Research at Columbia University. “It was the first major fellowship I had gotten for this research into osteoarthritis and joints. So the training grant did exactly what it was designed to do, because it set the foundations for what we’re doing now in my lab.”
A born scientist, Smeeton showed an early interest in biology and the natural world. As a high school student in the city of St. Catharines near Niagara Falls in Ontario, she developed a fascination for one of the body’s most intricate organs: the kidney. She majored in anatomy and cell biology at McGill University in Montreal, and studied kidney development in Norman Rosenblum’s lab at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto.
As a postdoc in Gage Crump’s lab at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, Smeeton shifted her focus from kidney development to cartilage regeneration. In a 2016 paper in eLife, she published a breakthrough discovery that zebrafish can be used to study arthritis.
To read more, visit https://stemcell.keck.usc.edu/cirm-scholar-alumni-joanna-smeeton.