Experience

NewLimit

• United States
• Biotechnology Research
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Scientist

  • Nov 2022 - Present



UCSF

• San Francisco, California, United States

• Postdoctoral Scholar

  • Apr 2019 - Nov 2022

  Spearheaded a new lab project focusing on understanding how DNA methylation at human ribosomal DNA (rDNA) repeats is regulated and dysregulated with aging Built a pipeline for analyzing CpG methylation data and ChIP data at rDNA repeats from NGS datasets utilizing specialized Python codes to investigate the epigenetic landscape of rDNA; Using this pipeline, demonstrated that transposase accessible, active rDNA repeats are hypomethylated at both the promoter and gene body Determined that rDNA is de novo methylated with age in mammals o Extracted genomic DNA from several mouse tissues for rDNA copy number assessment o Demonstrated that rDNA copy number does not change with age in mice indicating that age-linked increase in mammalian rDNA methylation must be due to de novo methylation rather than a selective loss or gain of unmethylated or methylated repeats Demonstrated that human cells are resilient to rDNA methylation perturbations, indicating that rDNA methylation change with age is not causative of aging phenotypes but instead is a biomarker o Constructed plasmids carrying dead Cas9 fused to a DNA methyltransferase under a Dox inducible promoter and CRISPR guide plasmids targeting several points in rDNA o Generated human cell lines carrying dead Cas9 fused to a DNA methyltransferase and CRISPR guides and induced methylation at either the promoter or gene body of rDNA o Determined that increasing methylation at either the promoter or the gene body in human cells is not sufficient to alter nascent or mature rRNA levels or nucleolar morphology o Determined that transcription factor UBF and Polymerase I are capable of binding promoters with increased methylation Mentored an undergraduate student in bioinformatics analysis of rDNA through the American Physician Scientist Association (APSA) Virtual Summer Research Program (VSRP)run by the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee Show less



UC Davis

• Davis, California, United States

• Graduate Student Researcher

  • Sep 2011 - Sep 2018

  Initiated a novel collaborative project to study meiosis in zebrafish Characterized early meiotic events of homologous chromosome pairing and segregation in zebrafish and expanded the understanding of sexually dimorphic contributions to aneuploidy o Demonstrated that the telomere bouquet is the site where key events leading to homologous chromosome pairing are coordinated o Demonstrated that deletion of spo11, a gene required for proper recombination in most studied organisms, resulted in very different effects in males and females where males were sterile while females produced aneuploid offspring o Demonstrated that deletion of rad21l1, a meiosis specific cohesin subunit, is dispensable for male meiosis but results in a P53-dependent sex reversion from female to male; preventing sex reversion by a p53 mutation resulted in females with fertility defects Expanded zebrafish meiosis work in the lab by training several undergraduates, lab technicians, graduate students, and a postdoc Was invited to create a zebrafish meiotic chromosome spread video protocol by the Journal of Visualized Experiments due to the quality of fluorescent microscope images of my chromosome spread preparations Show less



UCSB

• Undergraduate Researcher

  • Apr 2009 - Jun 2011

  Worked on an evolutionary project to identify a biased sex ratio X chromosome within a group of Drosophila melanogaster isogenic lines collected from around the globe o By repeatedly backcrossing males from select lines to a line of females carrying an attached-X chromosome (two X chromosomes sharing a common centromere), “extracted” the male X from its native background to a naïve background o By assaying male to female ratio in the populations carrying the “extracted” X, identified one line with a skew in favor of females and one line with a skew in favor of males Show less