April is a Staff Scientist in the Haniffa lab based at the Sanger Institute. She is involved in various wet-lab projects with an aim to improve and scale-up the skin organoid model to allow comparisons with human tissue. She is focusing on using the skin organoid model to better understand skin morphogenesis, cell-to-cell interactions in skin and for disease modelling. April has relevant experience in tissue culture, organoid models and imaging.

April completed her PhD at the University of Manchester studying the osmolyte strategy of human skin with intrinsic and extrinsic ageing. She then completed a post-doctoral position at the Milner Therapeutics Institute, University of Cambridge using patient- and iPSC-derived organoid models to investigate transcriptional and epigenetic drivers of inflammatory bowel disease and developed functional assays for use in drug discovery pipelines. She joined the Haniffa lab in 2022.

In her spare time April enjoys doing Crossfit, watching rugby and cooking new recipes.