Senior Scientist and Chief of Research at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto
Professor, Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics and Department of Obstetrics/Gynaecology, University of Toronto.

Dr. Janet Rossant's research interests centre on understanding the genetic control of normal and abnormal development in the early mouse embryo using both cellular and genetic manipulation techniques. Her interests in the early embryo have led to the discovery of a novel placental stem cell type, the trophoblast stem cell. She is Deputy Scientific Director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network and she directs the Centre for Modelling Human Disease in Toronto, which is undertaking genome-wide mutagenesis in mice to develop new mouse models of human disease.

Dr. Rossant trained at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, United Kingdom and has been in Canada since 1977, first at Brock University and then at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, from 1985 to 2005. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Societies of London and Canada and a Distinguished Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2007, Dr. Rossant was awarded the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology.

Dr. Rossant is actively involved in the international developmental biology community. She was an Editor of the journal Development for many years and she was President of the Society for Developmental Biology in 1996/97. She has also been involved in public issues related to developmental biology, most recently serving as Chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research working group on stem cell research and as a member of the National Academies Stem Cell Guidelines Panel.