She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from Duke University and did her postdoctoral studies at Harvard and Columbia. She is currently jointly appointed at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and the Department of Neurology at Columbia. As a principal investigator at NYGC, she directs the Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease (CGND), which has three main goals:
1. To serve as the hub of collaborative interactions between clinicians, computational biologists, and basic scientists;
2. To build and disseminate tools and resources for the neurodegenerative disease research community;
3. To establish a research program aimed at understanding intercellular interactions in neurodegenerative disease.
Her research program focuses on using novel tools and technologies in conjunction with cellular and animal models and patient-derived tissue samples to understand how disease-causing mutations perturb the intricate interplay between glial and neuronal cells in ALS-FTD. To understand the role of intercellular interactions in disease, they apply spatially-resolved transcriptomic and proteomic approaches to deconvolve both spatial and cell-type specific changes in gene expression across entire brain or spinal cord regions from rodent and human post-mortem tissue. Using such an integrated, cell ensemble-resolution, multi-omic approach, our studies generate multidimensional datasets that will enable us to determine cell- and region-specific molecular correlates of functional impairment in ALS-FTD. Moreover, they may provide a platform for other investigators to unveil markers specific to their disease of study. This will be encouraged and facilitated by sharing our platform and data with the broad scientific community.