Ans van Pelt

Ans van Pelt is Professor in Translational Reproductive Biology and head of the Reproductive Biology Laboratory at Amsterdam UMC, the Netherlands. She has over 30 years of experience in research on testis development and especially in spermatogonial stem cells and spermatogenesis with more than 100 peer reviewed publications. Her main research topic is to translate her knowledge on spermatogonial stem cells to novel fertility therapies to preserve fertility in prepubertal boys diagnosed with cancer and to restore fertility in men with spermatogenic failure. She reported as the first in the world the proof of principle of in vitro propagation of adult and prepubertal human spermatogonial stem cells, which is a major requirement for future potential clinical application of spermatogonial stem cell transplantation therapy. She is the PI on the ZonMW TAS grant ‘Spermatogonial stem cell transplantation to restore fertility in childhood cancer survivors’ and the ZonMW PSIDER grant ‘In vitro generation of human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived gametes to model human embryogenesis‘. She was coordinator of the Marie Curie FP7 ITN program Growsperm (www.Growsperm.eu) and assistant coordinator in the European FP project: EU FP5 (QLK-2000-00305). Furthermore, she was PI on many other successful past Kika, EU and ZonMW grant applications related on male fertility. In addition, she is the secretary of the Dutch Society for Stem Cell Research (DSSCR) and co-organizer of their annual conferences.