Dr Stephen Minger is the Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory and a Senior Lecturer in the new Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases at King's College London. Dr Minger received his PhD in Pathology (Neurosciences) in 1992 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. From 1992-1994, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, where he first began to pursue research in neural stem cell biology. In 1995, Dr Minger was appointed an Assistant Professor in Neurology at The University of Kentucky Medical School. He moved his stem cell research programme to Guy’s Hospital in 1996 and was appointed a Lecturer in Biomolecular Sciences at King's College London in 1998. Over the last 15 years, his research group has worked with a wide range of somatic stem cell populations, as well as mouse and human embryonic stem (ES) cells. In 2002, together with Dr Susan Pickering and Professor Peter Braude, Dr Minger was awarded one of the first two licenses granted by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for the derivation of human ES cells. His group subsequently generated the first human embryonic stem cell line in the UK and was one of the first groups to deposit this into the UK Stem Cell Bank.