Dr April Rose Foster

Senior Staff Scientist

April is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Haniffa Group working on skin during development and disease. Her focus is using multiomic approaches to understand skin in these context and use skin organoid models to investigate developmental processes and for disease modelling in comparison to human tissue.

April has relevant experience in translation dermatological research including tissue culture, 3D model development and imaging techniques. April carried out her BSc research placement year with Prof. Ralf Paus investigating interaction between hair follicles, sebaceous glands and adipose tissue during the hair cycle. Next, April was awarded a BBSRC PhD studentship with Prof. Rachel Watson and Prof. Cath O’Neill at the University of Manchester. During her PhD, she worked on the osmolyte strategy of human skin with intrinsic and extrinsic ageing. She then completed a post-doctoral position at the Milner Therapeutics Institute, University of Cambridge. Here, she used patient- and iPSC-derived intestinal organoid models and developed functional assays to investigate transcriptional and epigenetic drivers of inflammatory bowel disease for drug discovery pipelines. April’s research experience thus far has driven her passion for using the skin to further our understanding of development and cellular interactions in health and disease. She joined the Haniffa Group at Sanger in 2022 and is now a Senior Staff Scientist working across various skin and organoid projects in the lab.

My timeline

• Senior Staff Scientist - Haniffa Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

• Staff Scientist - Haniffa Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

• Research Associate - Milner Therapeutics Insititute, University of Cambridge

• PhD - Centre for Dermatology, University of Manchester

• BSc Research Placement - Institute of Inflammation and Repair, University of Manchester