Dr Elisa Laurenti’s career in cell biology has focused on studying haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) first using mouse models during her PhD with Prof. Andreas Trumpp in Lausanne, then with Dr John Dick in Toronto during her post-doctoral studies. There she established robust methods to study the function and molecular make-up of human HSCs. In 2014, she moved to the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute where she established my own laboratory thanks to a Wellcome – Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship. Her research aims to understand how HSC function is regulated at all stages of human life to eventually improve treatment of blood diseases. More specifically, her laboratory currently focuses on i) understanding how the functional output of the human HSC pool changes over a human lifetime, at steady-state and under inflammatory conditions; ii) characterising the molecular regulation of quiescence and its relevance to HSC ex vivo expansion and gene therapy.