Scientific lead for 3 early discovery/preclinical programs, engineering mammalian cell lines to optimize expression, secretion, stability, and tissue-specific targeting of therapeutic proteins within the context of cell therapy, development of cell-based, biochemical, and analytical assays to assess therapeutic protein production and function, cross-functional collaborations to develop in vitro quality control assays, designing in vivo experiments and conducting PK/PD analyses in relevant animal models, supporting pre-IND and IND-enabling studies, managing a team of 4 junior scientists, guiding 3 external collaborations, writing technical reports and communicating results in departmental and external meetings.

Development of cell-based and biochemical assays to validate small molecule high-throughput screening hits and to identify molecular targets of small molecules, conducting in-silico analyses with cross-functional teams to identify potential new pipeline opportunities and to configure therapeutic strategies.

Development of chromatin immunoprecipitation methods in human primary T cells as part of NGS workflow, utilization of antisense oligonucleotides to regulate gene expression, identification and proposal of a potential therapeutic target through mining NGS data sets, and validation of potential target using chromatin immunoprecipitation-quantitative PCR.

As a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Claire Moore, I developed and optimized a reconstituted eukaryotic RNA Polymerase II (Pol II) transcription assay. This assay was used to study release of Pol II from transcription complexes upon challenge with purified termination factors, including the exonuclease Rat1 (Xrn2) and the helicase Sen1 (Senataxin). To contribute to a team effort to develop of a single-molecule fluorescence-based transcription assay, I assessed the feasibility of Rat1 to enzymatically degrade a fluorescently-labeled RNA transcript. I conducted studies to test how evolutionarily-conserved surface regions of Pol II serve as binding sites to transcription factors and maintain effective termination mechanisms. I characterized the novel RNA processing factor Ipa1 and described how this factor functions as a positive transcription elongation effector while also positively influences transcription termination and balancing the levels of various chromatin modifications.