Bio
I am a molecular biologist and laboratory medicine physician. I am interested in understanding how cells turn genes on or off, and engineering ways we can turn genes on or off for biological discovery and therapeutic benefit.
In my postdoctoral work advised by Dr. Luke Gilbert (Arc Institute), I developed multiAsCas12a (multiplexed transcriptional interference Acidaminococcus Cas12a), a new functional genomics platform capable of higher-order combinatorial chromatin targeting of multiple coding and non-coding genetic elements per cell, including in pooled 6-plex CRISPRi screens. I proposed a group testing experimental framework to efficiently survey higher-order combinatorial spaces of genetic perturbations. I applied this approach to discover new enhancer elements and dissect the combinatorial logic of cis-regulatory elements. This work is available as a preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.18.558350v2
In my prior work as an MD-PhD student co-advised by Dr. Arjun Raj and Dr. Gerd Blobel at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, I led several studies focused on how gene regulatory information is maintained or altered through mitosis in mammalian cells, using epigenomics methods, single-molecule RNA imaging, and computational analysis.
