Andrea is a third year undergraduate biology major at UCLA. She is a first generation college student, a member of PEERS, and aspires to become a physician scientist in the future. She recently joined Dr. Kathrin Plath’s lab which  studies the mechanisms by which epigenetic changes affect the pluripotency of stem cells. 

To this end, Andrea is working on better understanding how long-noncoding RNA’s Xist and Tsix as well as higher-order reconfiguration of chromatin structure mediate  X chromosome inactivation in mouse embryonic stem cells in order to present a clearer understanding of the dynamic mechanisms of reprogramming and differentiation.