Kansas State University, MS, 1987 Renee Reijo Pera is a stem cell biologist and the President of the McLaughlin Research Institute in Great Falls, MT.

She initially enrolled in University of Wisconsin–Superior as a business major, but switched her interests during her junior year after taking a class on human genetics for non-majors.

[2] She then attended Kansas State University to work as a research technician, and ultimately received her master's degree in entomology.

[4] During her tenure, she helped to grow the university's total research expenditures to a record of $131 million and increased the number of funded student projects by over 20 percent.

[7][8] Her research group has also worked on developing alternative solutions for men experiencing infertility through an understanding of how immature sperm cells form.

[9][11] Reijo Pera has also worked to develop methods to improve the chances of pregnancy during in vitro fertilization by being able to identify and select healthy embryos for implantation.

[16] She and her collaborators decided to focus their attention on identifying certain developmental milestones that occur in an embryo one week after fertilization, measuring gene expression in individual cells.