Dr. Diana Monsivais Delivers the CRS New Year's Lecture
On Friday, January 20th, the CRS community gathered for the annual CRS New Year’s Lecture, delivered this year by one of our own alumni Dr. Diana Monsivais. Since completing her PhD in the lab of Dr. Serdar Bulun through the Driskill Graduate Program at Northwestern, Dr. Monsivais has established her own lab at Baylor College of Medicine where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Immunology and Pathology. As someone with a lifelong passion for science and an enthusiasm for teaching others, Dr. Monsivais has carved out a niche for herself in this role. Throughout the years, she has been recognized for her work on endometrial biology involving the development of mouse models of early pregnancy loss and endometriosis. 
Dr. Monsivais opened her talk titled, “Modeling the Regenerative Potential of the Endometrium Using Mouse Models and 3D Organoids” by noting that the average woman will spend a stunning 2500 days of her life in menstruation, yet the basic mechanisms that underpin endometrial regeneration are still unknown. Understanding this process will be a key step towards the development of treatments for endometrial-related diseases, such as endometriosis, early pregnancy loss, and adenomyosis. To achieve this, however, Dr. Monsivais strongly believes that adequate resources must be dedicated to the cause, stating, “Despite the fact that diseases like endometriosis are so prevalent in women, we’ve seen these funding disparities in understanding the biology of endometrial regeneration.”
During her presentation, Dr. Monsivais discussed her investigation into how members of the transforming growth factor Beta (TGF-Beta) signaling pathway are involved in causing endometrial regeneration defects that her group modeled using mice as well as mouse-derived 3D endometrial epithelium organoids. Interestingly, they not only found that TGF-beta signaling plays a major role in regulating many other important pathways, but they also identified stem cell markers like the aldehyde dehydrogenase family 1 (ALD1) enzymes, which are expressed to a higher degree in the endometrial tissue of endometriosis patients. Dr. Monsivais hopes to expand upon this observation by further characterizing gene expression of endometriosis subtypes and therefore better understand the pathology of the disease.
The CRS New Year’s Lecture kicked off what is sure to be another exciting calendar year of CRS programming in 2023. As Dr. Monsivais’s captivating talk showcased some of the amazing research being done by a CRS alumna, the experience was meaningful for both CRS trainees who hope to follow in her footsteps someday and the faculty who mentored her. The CRS community eagerly awaits the next opportunity to hear about more groundbreaking discoveries that may be right around the corner.