Dr. Svendsen is the founder and director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and is PI of a lab that focuses on using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to model various neurological diseases as well as cancers using organoids and organ-chip technologies. The other focus of Dr. Svendsen’s lab involves cutting-edge clinical trials that use stem cells to treat diseases such as ALS and Retinitis Pigmentosa. The Svendsen lab has also been involved with 5 missions to the ISS. Three were with Space Tango and aimed to test how human iPSC and neural progenitors grow in microgravity using automated closed systems. Two were with Bioserve and Axiom Space and aimed to test how microgravity affects stem cell differentiation into different tissues. Very recently Dr. Svendsen and the team at Cedars- Sinai performed the first-ever reprogramming of adult cells into pluripotent stem cells on the ISS.