BME 7900 Seminar Series/Dean's Excellence Seminar - Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, PhD

Description

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jennifer Phillips-Cremins from the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering. Her talk is not only part of our regular seminar series, but also a special Dean's Excellence Seminar.

3D Epigenome Reconfiguration in Brain Development and Neurodegenerative Disease

Abstract: The Cremins Lab focuses on higher-order folding of the genome and how epigenetic marks work through long-range regulatory mechanisms to govern neural cell fate in the mammalian brain. Much is already known regarding how transcription factors and epigenetic marks work in the context of the linear genome to regulate neuronal development and function. Yet, severe limitations still exist in our ability to apply this knowledge to engineer neuron fate at will or correct brain diseases in vivo. The overarching goal of the Cremins lab is to obtain detailed mechanistic understanding of how the genome is folded and reconfigured during neural lineage commitment and synaptogenesis and how these folding patterns influence the specificity, maturation and pruning of neuronal connections in healthy mammalian brain development. We also study how the genome is misfolded in neurodegenerative disease and we develop tools to engineer 3D genome folding on demand. Addressing this knowledge gap will provide an essential foundation for our long-term goal to engineer the 3-D genome to control neural cell fate in debilitating neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases.

Bio: Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Bioengineering and Genetics. Dr. Cremins obtained her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Andres Garcia. She then conducted a multi-disciplinary postdoc in the laboratories of Job Dekker and Victor Corces with the goal of generating the first high-resolution 3-D genome architecture maps during the differentiation of embryonic stem cells along the neuroectoderm lineage. Dr. Cremins now runs the 3-D Epigenomics and Systems Neurobiology laboratory at UPenn. Her primary research interests lie in understanding the epigenetic mechanisms that govern phenotype commitment in healthy neurons and how these epigenetic mechanisms go awry during the onset of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. She has been selected as a 2014 New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator, a 2015 Albert P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a 2016 and 2018 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and for the 2015 NIH Director's New Innovator Award.