UCSF NIH National Center for Translational Research in Reproduction and Infertility (NCTRI)
Adrian Erlebacher, MD, PhD
Director, Project 2 Lead
Adrian Erlebacher received his B.S. degree from Yale University, and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UCSF. Dr. Erlebacher joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology at the NYU School of Medicine in 2006, and then moved back to UCSF in 2016 to join the Department of Laboratory Medicine. He is a member of the UCSF ImmunoX program, the UCSF Center for Reproductive Sciences, and the UCSF Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Graduate program, where he serves as program Co-Director. Work in his laboratory lies at the intersection of immunology and developmental biology. In particular, his lab is interested in how the developmental properties of the uterus establish its remarkable immunological properties, and, conversely, how immune cells within the uterus influence pregnancy outcomes. One major focus has been on the paradox of fetomaternal tolerance, i.e. how the fetus and placenta avoid being rejected by the maternal immune system during pregnancy. His lab also works on how epigenetic processes within uterine stromal cells both enforce uterine quiescence in early pregnancy and contribute to labor onset at the end of gestation. The topics studied in the Erlebacher lab have implications for early pregnancy loss, preterm labor, preeclampsia, and other disorders of maternal/fetal health.
Linda C Giudice, MD, PhD
Project 1 Co-Investigator and Education Outreach Core Lead
Dr. Giudice is Distinguished Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF and Director of the UCSF-Stanford Endometriosis Center for Discovery, Innovation, Training, and Community Outreach. She is a biochemist and reproductive endocrinologist who cares mainly for patients with reproductive tract inflammatory disorders (e.g., endometriosis, adenomyosis) and infertility. Her research focuses on multi-omics approaches to elucidate function and dysfunction of human endometrium in health and disease. Her lab focuses on endometrial mesenchymal stem cells and tissue regeneration, steroid hormone signaling, immune profiles, epigenomic and transcriptomic signatures, signaling pathways, and cell-cell communications in endometrium important in pregnancy establishment and success. She has mentored >320 students, fellows and faculty, authored >350 peer-reviewed publications, and is co-editor of 7 textbooks on women’s health, endocrinology, environmental health, endometrium, and endometriosis. She has received numerous awards for her contributions to science, medicine, and mentoring and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Nadia Roan, PhD
Project 1 Co-Lead
Nadia Roan, PhD, received her undergraduate training from the University of California Berkeley, and completed her PhD at Harvard Medical School studying mucosal T cell responses to the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis. This was followed by postdoctoral studies at the Gladstone Institutes, where she studied the role of seminal plasma factors in reproductive health and HIV transmission. Dr. Roan is currently Professor of Urology at UCSF and Senior Investigator at Gladstone Institutes, where her lab focuses on characterizing the interactions between T cells and RNA viruses, including in the context of HIV transmission through mucosal tissues, HIV persistence and pathogenesis, and COVID-19 disease and immunity. Her lab is also actively engaged in studies understanding the role of T and NK cells in reproductive health and in the context of endometrial diseases associated with female infertility. For their studies, the Roan lab implements a variety of high-dimensional single-cell analysis and bioinformatics tools on primary cells obtained from patient specimens and ex vivo tissue models, to study antigen-specific T cell responses. Dr. Roan co-leads Project 1 of the NCTRI P50, which aims to define the role of antigen-specific endometrial and decidual lymphocytes in female fertility and infertility.
Heather Huddleston, MD
​Project 1 Co-Lead
Dr. Heather Huddleston is Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF and is a specialist in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. She cares for patients with a wide array of reproductive and fertility concerns. She has special interests in polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), recurrent pregnancy loss and uterine disorders, including Asherman's syndrome. Dr. Huddleston leads the UCSF Multi-disciplinary PCOS Clinic and Research Center. Through the associated research program, Dr. Huddleston oversees investigations aimed at advancing our understanding of how physical activity, depression, cognition, sleep, and metabolic health all contribute to the experience of patients with PCOS. Given her interest in both PCOS and recurrent pregnancy loss, Dr. Huddleston is well positioned to colead Project 1 of the NCTRI P50, which aims to define the role of antigen-specific endometrial and decidual lymphocytes in female fertility and infertility, including in inflammatory conditions like PCOS, endometriosis and obesity. Dr. Huddleston earned her medical degree at Harvard Medical School. She completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, followed by a fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility, at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. She has worked at UCSF since completing her training in 2005.
Robert Blelloch, MD, PhD
Project 3 Co-Lead
Dr. Robert Blelloch, MD, PhD, is Professor and Associate Chair of Basic Research in the Department of Urology. He holds a joint appointment in Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and is a member of the both the Center for Reproductive Sciences and the Institute of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. His group is broadly interested in molecular mechanisms that regulate cell fate decisions in normal and abnormal development. One major interest has been on the role for a class of small non-coding RNAs called microRNAs in cell fate decisions. His lab showed in 2017 that deletion of a locus that gives rise to multiple microRNAs, called the miR-290 cluster in mice and the miR-371 cluster in humans result in intrauterine growth retardation due to premature differentiation of trophoblast cells in the placenta. This work led to an expanded interest in mechanisms regulating cell fate decisions in time and space during mouse and more recently human placental development. Recently the lab discovered a common progenitor cell population that can differentiate into very distinct cell fates on the two opposing sides of the human chorion: the villous chorion (aka placenta) and the smooth chorion. On the villous side, these cells differentiate into syncytiotrophoblast cells that are in direct contact with maternal blood with roles in the transfer of nutrients and production of essential hormones for pregnancy. On the smooth chorion side, the cells differentiate into a distinct cytotrophoblast population that forms a multilayered epithelium, analogous to the skin. The smooth chorion trophoblast cells also inhibit trophoblast invasion into the maternal decidual on the smooth chorion side, unlike the villous side where such invasion is critical to a successful pregnancy including through the remodeling of the maternal vasculature to direct blood to the placenta. In collaboration with Dr. Susan Fisher, the lab is now aiming to determine the factors that drive these alternative fates and what are the consequences when these fate decisions go wrong. Other projects in the lab extend into other aspects of early mammalian development and into cancer including mechanisms regulating the immune response to cancer.
Susan J Fisher, PhD
Project 3 Co-Lead and Education and Outreach Core Lead
Susan Fisher, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences. She has over 35 years of experience studying the human placenta in the context of normal pregnancy and the major pregnancy complications. She and her group have developed in vitro models that have allowed them to study the role of proteinases, cell-matrix interactions, angiogenic/vasculogenic regulators, Eph/ ephrin family members, Notch signaling and immune molecules in normal placentation. The results of these studies enabled parallel analyses of abnormal placentation in preeclampsia (PE) and preterm birth (PTB), the common trisomies (13,18,21) and placenta accreta spectrum disorder. Additionally, they have been using global transcriptional profiling to identify changes in placental/trophoblast gene expression as a function of gestational age and as a consequence of the aforementioned pregnancy complications. Companion global protein expression data (generated using mass spectrometry approaches, see below) has enabled prioritization of potential differentiation or disease regulators for functional analyses. In the last several years, they extended these analyses to an epigenetic level, collaboratoring with Dr. Joseph Costello, incorporating bisulfite-seq, ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq technologies into the methods they routinely apply. In parallel, they expanded their capabilities to include profiling specific subpopulations of cells at the maternal-fetal interface that are captured by laser microdissection. This approach revealed a great deal of novel information about the gene and protein expression patterns of these cell types that was obscured when the placenta/basal plate as a whole was profiled as the signals were diluted by other cell types, which are more numerous. Recently, she and her group have worked with Dr. Robert Blelloch to develop methods for applying single cell RNA-seq approaches to the human placenta and smooth chorion. With Dr. Linda Giudice they showed that cytotrophoblast-derived extracellular vesicles have interesting effects on human decidual cells that are mediated, in part, by TNFa. With Dr. Adrian Erlebacher, they have been studying mechanisms of maternal-fetal (placental) tolerance.
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Dr. Fisher has dual expertise in mass spectrometry (MS)-based analyses, having completed a 5-year postdoctoral fellowship in this area. She has over four decades of experience in biological MS. Throughout her career, a major focus has been glycan analyses, specifically the structural characterization of human complex oligosaccharides. Her group is also very experienced in MS-based methods of protein analysis (glycosite mapping, sequential window acquisition of all theoretical fragment ion spectra [SWATH]).
Michelle Halstead, PhD
2024 - 2025 Pilot Project Lead
Michelle Halstead completed her PhD at the University of California, Davis in 2020, where she studied the relationship between epigenetic remodeling and preimplantation embryo development under the guidance of Dr. Pablo Ross. For her postdoctoral training, she worked with Dr. Amelie Bonnet-Garnier at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique to identify key regulators of genome activation in bovine embryos. She then joined Dr. Aleksandar Rajkovic’s laboratory at the University of California San Francisco in 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research at UCSF is driven by a fundamental question: what drives successful mammalian development? In humans, over 50% of embryos are lost before a woman even knows she is pregnant, and about 5% of couples suffer from recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL). Lethal genetic variants inherited by the embryo may contribute to pregnancy loss, but such variants are vastly under characterized. Michelle Halstead’s P50 pilot project at UCSF aims to identify lethal genetic variants associated with RPL and study their effect on human development using stem-cell derived embryo-like models.
Marina Sirota, PhD
Project 1 Collaborator
Marina Sirota, PhD, is Professor and Acting Director at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI) at UCSF. Prior to that she was the Lead Research Scientist in the Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford University and had worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing Precision Medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University. Dr. Sirota’s research experience in translational bioinformatics spans nearly 20 years during which she has co-authored over 170 scientific publications. Her research interests lie in developing computational integrative methods and applying these approaches in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics with a special focus on women’s health and inflammatory disorders. The Sirota laboratory is funded by NIA, NLM, NIAMS, Pfizer, March of Dimes and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. As a young leader in the field, she was awarded the AMIA Young Investigator Award in 2017. She currently leads the UCSF March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at UCSF and co-directs the UCSF-Stanford Endometriosis Center for Discovery, Innovation, Training, and Community outreach (ENACT), a center to study precision medicine for endometriosis. Dr. Sirota also is the founding director of the AI4ALL program at UCSF, with the goal of introducing high school girls to applications of AI and machine learning in biomedicine and more generally leads the outreach and advocacy activities at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. Her role in our NCTRI Center is to work with colleagues regarding data analysis and data integration.
Eliver Ghosn, PhD
Project 1 Collaborator
Eliver Ghosn, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics, Division of Immunology, at Emory University. He is also a member of the Lowance Center for Human Immunology, Emory Vaccine Center, and Children's Center for Immunity and Applied Genomics and an affiliated faculty member in the Bioinformatics Program at Georgia Institute of Technology.
The Ghosn Lab at Emory employs multi-omics single-cell technologies to study the development and activation of human B cells and antibody-secreting cells (or plasma cells) across the lifespan, from prenatal to adult life. More recently, the Ghosn Lab pivoted its research to study the immunopathology of COVID-19, focusing on the B-cell and antibody responses in the mucosal sites. Their studies reveal mechanisms that lead to B-cell-mediated diseases, including autoimmunity, infectious diseases, and hematological disorders that are predominant at different ages, informing new therapies, diagnostics, and vaccines targeting infants versus adults.