Ashley earned her BA from Vanderbilt University and PhD in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology at the University of California - San Francisco (UCSF) under the mentorship of Drs. Bruce Conklin and Todd McDevitt. Her doctoral research was funded by a NIH NRSA F31 Predoctoral Fellowship to investigate how to engineer morphogenesis of induced pluripotent stem cell models mimicking trunk formation by using CRISPR-based assays, machine learning, and 3D organoid systems. Ashley then joined the lab of Dr. James Briscoe at the Francis Crick Institute in London where she earned an EMBO Long-term Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her work investigated the genetic regulation of the stem cell populations that give rise to the neural tube combining in vivo CRISPR techniques, in vivo lineage tracing, and live imaging.
Ashley continues this work in her own lab at the University of Toronto, examining how cell intrinsic fate decisions and tissue scale morphogenesis interact, forming feedback loops to connect individual cells to population level behaviours during neural tube formation. Her lab uses techniques in bio-engineering, organoid protocol development, embryology, and genomics to create an interdisciplinary approach to address fundamental questions in developmental biology.