Dr. Irina Polejaeva is a Professor of Developmental Biology in the Department of Animal, Dairy and Veterinary Sciences at Utah State University (USU) and is also a member of the USU Veterinary Diagnostics and Infectious Diseases Team. Her primary research interests are: 1) the development of genetically engineered large animal models for biomedical and agricultural applications using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing techniques; and 2) cloning efficiency improvement through understanding the molecular mechanism of epigenetic reprogramming.