Isaryhia R
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
Expertise
I got my bachelors in Microbiology and Immunology with a research focus in molecular biology and genetics. For my PhD at Caltech I am working in a lab focused on molecular biology of Drosophila Embryonic Development
Bio
Hello! My name is Isaryhia, but you can feel free to call me Isa. I am a second-year Ph.D. student at Caltech researching the molecular biology of transcriptional regulators in Drosophila melanogaster. I am the first in my family to have earned a college degree and come from a low-income non-academic background. I earned my bachelor's of science from UC Irvine where I studied microbiology and immunology and had a research focus on genetics and genomics performing RNA-seq on insect parasitic nematodes and later mouse skeletal muscle cells. I have been working in research for the past 5 years and served as an IMSD and MARC NIH-funded scholar during my undergraduate. I have been published twice in scientific journals and participated in 5 national conference presentations and won 3 awards for outstanding presentations. I am an avid reader with a love for sci-fi and science non-fiction works. I enjoy swimming, watching Parks and Rec, and spending time traveling! I love sharing my science and mentoring students and engaging them with science! I also love learning about parasites and microbes, and nematodes are my favorite animal next to snails. Ultimately, as a first-generation low-income latinx woman in STEM, I have had the amazing privilege to be mentored by wonderful women and men in STEM and I hope to be able to pay that forward.Project ideas
Universal tools: Understanding the role of Transcription Factors in Genome maintanance
Transcription factors (TFs) are key proteins and gene regulators which play diverse and important roles in regulating expression of genes within cells. While there are some unique TFs which play specific and isolated roles, many TFs are used and reused in unique and common combinations to produce a specific cell type identity, cell activation as well as participate in important key steps during development. A research paper on one such set of common TFs like P53 and MYC in cancer, or OCT4 and SOX2 in stem cells, would not only introduce the important of these universal protein tools but also demonstrate how combinatorics is central to understand how universal tools are used to build unique cell identities from all the genetic info stored in our genomes.