My graduate studies at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics focused on gene regulation and the role of transcriptional co-regulators during mouse development . I devoted my postdoctoral training at NYU to explore the multiple ways in which nuclear organization and chromosomal interactions are important for regulation of cellular processes in development and disease. In the Skok lab I studied the process of Class Switch Recombination in B cells and showed that DNA interactions are important to orchestrate this recombinatorial event and avoid translocations that can lead to lymphomas. I also developed techniques that were lacking in the field such as a CRISPR/dCas9-based system for live visualization of multiple loci in different colors and contributed to the development of computational pipelines for analyses of DNA interactions. Now at the NIH, our lab is interested in understanding cell lineage differentiation, gene regulation and how non-coding DNA elements and the 3D architecture of chromosomes contribute to these processes during development and disease. We are also fascinated with early-mammalian development as a system to decipher how cells make lineage decisions and how gene regulatory networks are established.
