Samer Hussein is an assistant professor and researcher at the Université Laval and the Oncology Division, CHU de Québec – Université Laval Research Center. Dr. Hussein completed his Ph.D. in Neurological Sciences at McGill University, where he studied early fate decisions governing embryonic stem (ES) cell differentiation. He began his post-doctoral training with Dr. Timo Otonkoski at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where he studied the effect of reprogramming on genomic stability of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). He then moved to Toronto and completed his post-doctoral training with Dr. Andras Nagy at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. There, he continued to work on understanding the molecular underpinnings of the reprogramming process towards iPSCs using high throughput sequencing technologies. He has published seminal work in the field of reprogramming demonstrating several key findings on how reprogramming to iPSCs affects the chromatin state, genetic stability, and gene expression of cells undergoing this process of induced cell fate change.  In 2016, he established his lab at CHU de Québec Research Centre – Université Laval in Québec City, and his work now focuses on the use of RNA sequencing to investigate the role of long non-coding RNAs in reprogramming and pluripotency. The major goal of his lab is to understand the molecular mechanisms and functional interactions of long non-coding RNAs that influence the acquisition of different cell states during both development and cancer.