Professor James Adjaye was appointed director of the newly established Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine (ISRM) in May 2012. He was a group leader of the Molecular Embryology and Aging Group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (Berlin) and coordinated livSYSiPS—the systems biology of network stress based on data generated from in vitro differentiated hepatocytes derived from individual-specific human iPS cells (ERASysBio Plus). This multi-national (Germany, UK, Italy, USA, and Austria) project employed a systems biology approach to investigate the etiology of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which comprises a broad spectrum of disease states ranging from manageable stress as in simple steatosis to excessive stress as in steatohepatitis. More recently Prof Adjaye has adopted human urine as a source of SIX2-positive kidney stem cells for the use in studying nephrogenesis and kidney-associated diseases.