Sonja Schrepfer's Biography

Sonja Schrepfer, Professor of Surgery, University of California-San Francisco

Sonja Schrepfer, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery, founded the Transplant and Stem Cell Immunobiology (TSI) Lab at Stanford. In 2015, she joined the faculty of the Department of Surgery at the University of California San Francisco as Director of the TSI Lab at UCSF. Dr. Schrepfer's research career has been dedicated to making fundamental discovers in stem cell immunology studying aging of the immune system and its effects on the stem cell niche by using spaceflight as model for aging. Tissue chips which launched on SpaceX16 and SpaceX25 were cultured on the International Space Station (ISS) and are being analyzed to understand implications for future long-term space missions, as well as translating this knowledge to earth-bound immune research.

Disclosure: Sonja is scientific founder of Sana Biotechnology Inc, which she joined as SVP (Head of the Hypo-Immune Platform) in 2019 and is Adjunct Professor at UCSF.