Frédérique Ruf-Zamojski is a trained biomedical bench scientist, currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Neurology Department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research career has been driven by a strong interest in understanding the normal and pathological molecular signaling mechanisms underlying cell fate, decisions, and plasticity, in response to the local cues present in tissues’ microenvironments. She defended her PhD thesis at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai analyzing the genomic responses of gonadotrope cells in presence of varying GnRH concentrations under the supervision of Dr. Stuart Sealfon. During her postdoctoral fellowships, she investigated cell fate and differentiation during normal and dystrophic skeletal muscle development, first in zebrafish embryos (Muscular Dystrophy Association Scholar, California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Scott Fraser), then in transfected primary muscle myoblasts (Marie Curie Scholar, University of Geneva Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Laurent Bernheim).
As a research faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, her main research has been focusing in neuroendocrinology, predominantly on the analysis of pituitary cells, and more specifically on the molecular and signaling responses of pituitary gonadotropes. Her goal has been on expanding our comprehension of the regulation of pituitary gonadotrope cells, using several models from cell lines, mouse pituitaries, and human post-mortem samples. She developed several assays to characterize the gene expression and epigenomic status of pituitary cells at the single-cell (sc) and single nuclei (sn) level. This work has led to numerous collaborations on different tissues and projects both within Mount Sinai and with outside faculties. She is continuing to explore multidisciplinary and collaborative scientific relationships to further develop our understanding of cellular mechanisms in health and disease focusing on the pituitary gland.