Dr. Judith Gasson's research focuses on understanding the processes that regulate the formation of normal blood cells and how those processes are perturbed in blood cell cancers such as leukemias.

Cells of the blood differ greatly in form and function, yet they are all derived from a common pluripotent "stem" cell in the bone marrow. Gasson and her colleagues have adapted a murine embryonic stem cell system to express an inducible form of constitutively active Notch, under conditions that mimic the stem cell niche in vivo. Global gene expression profiling studies have confirmed the importance of the Wnt pathway in maintenance of the primitive phenotype of these cells. Current experiments are focused upon identification and characterization of the transcriptional networks that regulate and maintain these pathways.