In recognition of my accomplishments at the company, at the completion of my first year at Modalis Therapeutics I was jump-promoted to Principal Scientist and continued to lead development of genetic therapy using our company’s proprietary technology.

In 2023 I began a position as a scientist at Modalis Therapeutics, an epigenetic gene therapy company located in Waltham, MA. My primary responsibility here has been to lead a project developing Modalis’ proprietary technology into a therapeutic for a genetic muscle disease. I have successfully designed and concluded several in vivo and in vitro studies to advance this research program. This position has also included pursuing outside research collaborations and managerial responsibilities supervising a research associate.

I left the Yale School of Medicine in January of 2023. For the following 6 months I maintained research affiliate status while I completed the submission of a manuscript and oversaw its revision remotely in collaboration with the Lek laboratory at the Yale School of Medicine and the Emerson Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. This resulted in the publication of the manuscript, on which I was the lead author.

In 2020 I continued and expanded my research in a new position as an Associate Research Scientist (non-tenure track faculty) at the Yale School of Medicine Department of Genetics. In this leadership position I furthered my work into the role of hyaluronic acid and PI3K/MAPK signaling as well as expanded my research into additional aspects of FSHD such as identifying the genetic basis of DUX4-induced toxicity, pre-clinical drug development, HIF1α signaling, and mitochondrial energy dynamics. I published much of this work a corresponding author upon its completion. Additionally, I have published a review article as the primary/corresponding author, published as a contributing author on two additional review articles and an additional research paper, worked with multiple members of the department to establish novel cell-based assays, served as a graduate student mentor, obtained funding from the FSHD Society as a PI, and was a co-PI on both a second FSHD Society and on a Wellstone Center grant, and I received a best poster award at a FSHD Society IRC meeting.

In 2013 I joined the Wellstone Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (now UMass Chan Medical School) and the laboratory of Dr. Charles Emerson Jr. The Center focuses research on understanding the disease mechanisms that underlie facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) at the genetic, epigenetic, and biochemical levels, and on the development of new therapeutic approaches to treat the disease. In my time in the Emerson lab, I concentrated my studies on the molecular biology of the DUX4 protein, the product of the DUX4 gene which causes the disease. Using cellular models, I showed that DUX4 interacts with the multifunctional protein C1qBP, and that disease pathology is associated with aberrant hyaluronic acid (HA) production, a prominent signaling molecule. Using an inhibitor of HA production, 4MU, I demonstrated that preventing the synthesis of HA results in myogenic cells becoming strongly resistant to the toxic effects of the DUX4 protein, and prevents the appearance of a number of additional DUX4-dependent cytopathologies. Notably, I have shown that resistance to DUX4-induced pathology can be effected with only marginal inhibition of the transcriptional activator function of DUX4, thereby challenging the prevailing notion that disease arises as a result of an inappropriate transcriptional program being executed in myogenic cells. I published this completed project as the lead author in Science Advances. In addition to this work, I have also been investigated the role of downstream signaling cascades in regulating DUX4-dependent pathology, and I found inhibitors of the PI3K and MAPK pathways can protect myoblasts from DUX4-induced cell death and can affect the abundance of the DUX4 protein through a post-transcriptional mechanism. During this time, I was both supported as a post-doctoral research associate and as a post-doctoral fellow of the Wellstone Program, and as a fellow of the FSHD Society.

Completed and published my postdoctoral research project in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology as a primary author

Developed and optimized a method for detecting in vivo lariat splicing intermediatesCollaborated with a bioinformatics graduate student to build large scale maps of lariat branchpointsMentored and trained several undergraduates and early stage graduate studentsStudied combinatorial regulation of pluripotency control regions by several transcription factors Published completed project in Genome Research

Published completed research project in Molecular and Cellular Biology as the primary authorStudied differentiation and control of gene expression by master regulatory transcription factors

Completed research project and dissertation thesis: The Dynamic Interactions of the alpha2 Repressor Engender Robust Repression of Developmentally Regulated Genes while Priming them for Rapid Activation

Directed a laboratory section in a sophomore-level genetic class