My research focuses on understanding how environmental challenges induce molecular and genomic changes throughout the body to help coordinate an individual’s behavioral and physiological plasticity.
I received a B.S. in Neuroscience (2016) and an M.S. in Biochemistry (2018) from the University of Scranton. In 2024, I completed my PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. My graduate research investigated the behavioral, physiology, and genomic shifts across the brain and peripheral tissues during social status transitions.
Since joining the Gore lab, I have been applying my bioinformatics skills to examine how exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) during prenatal development can lead to long-lasting genomic changes across the Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) axis, an important neuroendocrine system that regulates many body processes including response to stress, sexual activity, and energy regulation. Since EDCs can act as mimic steroid hormones, they can interfere with endocrine systems like the HPA axis by binding to hormonal receptors and altering genomic expression. This work will provide the foundation for my investigation and characterization of how these molecular changes are transferred to the next generation via the germline. I will use single-cell RNA sequencing to investigate the biology of individual cells within complex tissues like the ovaries and oocytes to understand better how different cellular subpopulations respond to EDCs and how this environmental disruption may influence changes in molecular mechanisms that the next generation can inherit.