H. Efsun Arda obtained her Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts Medical School. During her doctorate training in Dr. Marian Walhout’s group, she studied gene regulatory networks that pertain to the metabolism of the model organism, C. elegans. She uncovered a set of metabolic genes that are sensitive to the nutrient content of C. elegans bacterial diet.
Driven by her interest in gene regulatory networks and developmental biology, Dr. Arda joined the laboratory of Dr. Seung Kim at Stanford University for her postdoctoral training. As a JDRF fellow, she developed cell sorting methods to purify primary pancreatic cells from children and adults, and used RNA sequencing to reveal hundreds of genes that are differentially regulated during the first 10 years of human lifespan, several of which are linked by association studies to diabetes risk. To understand how pancreatic cell type-specific gene expression programs are controlled at the genomic level, she then combined cell sorting with chromatin profiling assays to delineate the regulatory chromatin landscape of human pancreatic cell types. This work revealed thousands of putative enhancer regions that are linked to cell type-specific gene expression in the human pancreas. Currently, her group has been characterizing the cell lineages that give rise to human pancreas using single-cell methods.
