Juan Gnecco, PhD
Dr. Juan Gnecco is a postdoctoral fellow who aspires to an academic career in gynecological research and now leads the 3D endometrium team. Gnecco received his PhD in Molecular Pathology and Immunology at Vanderbilt in 2018, working with renowned endometriosis investigator Dr. Kevin Osteen. At Vanderbilt, Gnecco developed microfluidic devices to probe endothelial-stromal-immune interactions in the context of endometrial inflammation and exposure to environmental chemicals, thus illuminating possible influences on development and progression of endometriosis.
At MIT, Gnecco has pushed frontiers in two areas – 3D imaging of lesion structure using tissue clearing and light-sheet imaging, and development of 3D co-culture models of patient-derived endometrial organoids with stromal and endothelial cells, to capture the physiology of both the eutopic endometrium as well as ectopic lesions, the former in health and disease.
Gnecco continues to collaborate with the Osteen lab, on a project supported by a Gates Foundation grant to the Osteen and Bruner-Tran labs that grew out of his thesis work. Although his invited talk on imaging adenomyosis at the 2020 SRI meeting in March was cancelled due to Coronavirus, Gnecco is looking forward to actively engaging at conferences in the coming year.
