Dr. Elizabeth Heller of University of Pennsylvania presents

Elizabeth Heller, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Pharmacology
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Title of talk: “Epigenetic editing for the study of addiction”

This seminar will be in 1131 Bioinformatics.

Please join us and show support for our seminar speakers!

Host: Jessica Walsh

Dr. Heller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine and a core faculty member of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. Her research is focused on elucidating the causal mechanisms by which drug-induced epigenetic reprogramming contributes to neuropsychiatric disease. To investigate this, her lab directly manipulates histone and DNA modifications at specific genes in vivo, using viral delivery of novel epigenetic editing tools, such as zinc-finger transcription factors and CRISPR/dCas9-fusion proteins. They utilize high-throughput sequencing to identify genes at which drug- or stress-regulation of a known epigenomic signature correlates with changes in expression. Additionally, Dr. Heller is an amazing mentor and aspirational role-model. https://hosting.med.upenn.edu/hellerlab/