Variant Effects Seminar Series (VESS)

Jonuelle (Jon) Acosta is a postdoctoral fellow at MIT co-mentored by Francisco Sánchez-Rivera and Michael Hemann. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in David Feldser's laboratory, where he utilized tractable mouse models of cancer to model the impact of p53 restorative therapies in small cell carcinoma.  As an F31 predoctoral fellow,  he identified novel context-dependent mechanisms of p53-mediated tumor suppression that may be utilized to develop novel strategies to treat this aggressive cancer subtype, and others. During his postdoctoral work, he is integrating next-generation genome editing technology with complex ex vivo and in vivo platforms to understand how cellular context influences genetic interactions, and its impact on cancer progression and evolution.

Christina is a doctoral clinical fellow in the Genome Function Lab at the Francis Crick Institute, where she develops prime editing-based high-throughput methods to investigate the functional impact of genetic variants, with a focus on non-coding regions. She previously earned her medical degree from the University of Göttingen and conducted research at Rockefeller University on genetic drivers of cancer metastasis. She will co-present a recently established prime editing variant screening platform in haploid human cells alongside Michael Herger.

Michael Herger is a biologist with a special interest in interrogating the function, interactions, and mechanisms of epigenetic factors using scalable functional genomics tools. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow in Greg Findlay’s Lab at the Francis Crick Institute (London, UK) and previously earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge, focusing on directed evolution of CRISPR/Cas reagents. He will be co-presenting recent work on pooled prime editing screens in human haploid cells together with Christina Kajba.