Jeffrey L. Houpt Lectures in Genome Sciences Presents Dr. Karen Adelman

Karen L. Adelman, Ph.D., leads the Transcriptional Responses to the Environment Group within the Laboratory of Molecular Carcinogenesis. She earned her Ph.D. in 1999 at Universite de Paris VI, working at the Institut Pasteur. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of John Lis, Ph.D., at Cornell University before joining NIEHS in 2005. She has published more than 30 articles and reviews in leading biomedical journals during her career, including 15 since she joined the NIEHS.

Major areas of research:

• Investigating the role of paused polymerase in coordinating cellular responses to signals from the extracellular environment
• Dissecting the role of pause-inducing factors such as the NELF complex during cell differentiation, cell proliferation and the response to environmental exposures

Current projects:

• Screening for novel protein factors that regulate promoter-proximal pausing
• Examining the interactions between paused Pol II and nucleosomes, focusing on the role of pausing in generating a permissive chromatin environment surrounding target gene promoters
• Probing the role of pause-inducing factors like the Negative ELongation Factor (NELF) in mammalian development and the inflammatory response
• Dissecting the cis-acting elements that establish a paused polymerase, including upstream DNA and the sequence of the RNA transcript