Dr. Derecka earned her MS, and PhD degrees from Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, along with a graduate research fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Germany. She joined St. Jude in 2020 and launched her laboratory-based program to study how changes and regulation in the bone marrow microenvironment may affect the development of stem cells.