Dr. Saghi Ghaffari is a stem cell biologist with expertise in blood and blood disorders. She was trained in medicine and obtained her Medical Degree (Doctorat d’Etat) in Paris, France, before completing her PhD with Dr. Connie Eaves in Vancouver, Canada. She was a Clinical Scientist/Post-doctoral Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT in Cambridge, MA, where she worked with Dr. Harvey Lodish. She then joined the faculty of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She pioneered studies that identified longevity factors FOXOs as key regulators of embryonic and adult hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and made important contributions to the understanding of their function in stem cells and hematopoiesis. These lines of work led her lab to the current organelle (lysosomes and mitochondria) studies of HSCs and erythroid cells. Her laboratory recently discovered an unanticipated but central function for lysosomes in regulating HSCs.