Schindler Lab News
December 2025
We had our annual holiday party with the Jain lab! We played our gift game with a twist!
November 2025
Congrats to Mayra Romero for successfully defending her PhD in Molecular Biosciences. Way to go Dr. Romero (and check out her cake!)!
October 2025
Karen traveled up the NJ turnpike to present the lab’s work on the genetics of aneuploidy at RU Newark. She had a wonderful visit getting to know her RU colleagues to the north!
September 2025
Postdoc Marc Begley presented his work on how aging impacts meiotic spindles at the annual RU Postdoc Symposium and won a 1st Prize presentation award!
August 2025
The Schindler lab welcomes new PhD students Phia Maddocks and Cierra Faries. Julia Einfeldt transitioned from tech to MS student!
July 2025
Congrats to Marlena Duke for successfully defending her PhD in Reproductive and Clinical Sciences from Old Dominion University. Way to go Dr. Duke!
June 2025
June was a busy conference month. Karen got to speak at the Fertility, contribution of maternal inheritance meeting in Paris, France and at the Chromosome Dynamics GRC in Maine.
May 2025
Karen is director of the Gametogenesis and Embryogenesis module for the Frontiers in Reproduction course held at the MBL. Every May she spends 2 weeks educating and training the next generation of reproductive sciences. Check out the 2025 FIRbees!
April 2025
The lab traveled to Philly to attend the Tri-Repro Symposium hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. Marc Begley gave a great talk. Here’s Julia Einfeldt next to her poster. Check out the upcoming Tri-Repro Symposium being held on April 30-May 1, 2026 at Cornell. We are excited that RU is being added to the Tri-Repro group and will be hosting the symposium in 2027!
March 2025
Karen traveled to UC Irvine to give a seminar on the lab’s work. She was super excited that her host was Dr. Peter Donovan, a member of her PhD thesis committee at Jefferson! It was great to catch up.
February 2025
Meet undergraduate Anika Mishra! Anika joined our group last summer as a rising senior undergraduate and has been working with Mayra Romero, a graduate student in the lab. Our funding supports the training of the next generation of scientists in the US workforce and we are fortunate to have these talented students in the lab.
Meet the lab and what we do! I’m pleased to start off our lab introductions with Marlena Duke. Marlena is a highly trained human embryologist who has helped thousands of people achieve their dreams of having children. Marlena decided to go back to graduate school to obtain her Ph.D. to continue her career of being an IVF lab director. I am fortunate that Marlena reached out to me to sponsor and mentor her Ph.D. project where she is trying to understand why some women make poor quality eggs. Marlena brings exquisite expertise in gamete manipulation to the lab and she has been essential in training new people that we bring into the group. Take a look at her bio and why she is passionate about her work.
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MTOCs are pink, DNA is blue. We love our images, and hope you do too!
Did you know that 1 out of 6 couples world-wide are dealing with infertility today? Our NIH-funded research is focused on understanding the processes that are involved in making healthy eggs with the long term goal to figure out why these processes go wrong in humans so frequently. Mistakes in these processes cause infertility, miscarriages, IVF failures and birth defects. We have had the honor and privilege of having funding to support this work since 2007. In this time, we have made important fundamental discoveries in how chromosome segregation is controlled and how genetic mutations can alter healthy egg-making processes. Infertility is rising world-wide and we want to do our part to make sure that everyone who wants to have a family, can have a healthy one. Continued NIH funding support is critical to our mission.
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My colleagues at SRF have put together a fabulous e-book on Reproduction that is targeted to pre-teen and teens and it’s FREE. Here’s their blurb: Do you want to know more about how your environment and lifestyle affects your reproductive health? Well, the Society for Reproduction and Fertility (SRF) is proud to present its first educational e-book entitled ‘Reproduction in a Changing World’. Written by leading researchers and clinical doctors, this e-book creatively illustrates the latest scientific evidence in the field. The e-book is for those aged 11 years and older with the aim of providing them with knowledge about their own bodies to make informed decisions on how to improve their lives and the lives of others. ‘Reproduction in a Changing World’ is free to download from the SRF website (https://srf-reproduction.org/srf-e-book/). We would also value your feedback so that we can continue to produce education resources for you (https://forms.gle/1gEfN9m2WU9dMCmv7). Please consider checking it out!
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January 2025
As co-editor in chief of the Reproduction journal, Dr. Schindler is a member of the Society for Reproduction and Fertility (SRF) council and she has the honor of attending the annual Fertility UK conference. This year she traveled to Liverpool, UK for an exciting and busy program. There are lots of networking benefits and Dr. Schindler got to catch up with lots of colleagues- both international and US based. Check out the pics!
