Julie Sneddon is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is a member of the Diabetes Center and the Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research.  Julie grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and then attended Harvard College, where she earned her degree in Biochemical Sciences and performed her honors thesis research with Dr. Stuart Schreiber.  She next headed west to Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. Patrick O. Brown.  Julie then returned to the Boston area, where she completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Douglas Melton at Harvard University.   She now heads her own laboratory, where her group seeks to understand the role of the tissue microenvironment in pancreatic development and to harness this knowledge for the production of optimal human embryonic stem cell-derived pancreatic beta-like cells for the purposes of cell replacement therapy to treat diabetes.