Research
Life detection on Ocean Worlds
Astrobiologists are very excited about the frozen moons of the outer Solar System because some of them, like Enceladus and Europa, seem to have all of the ingredients necessary to sustain life. One day, we hope to send missions to these Ocean Worlds and search for signs of life. But what should we look for exactly once we get there? In my research as a NASA Postdoc Fellow at JPL, I’m studying how different biosignature molecules behave under the harsh conditions found on these icy bodies and the best ways to detect them. This will hopefully help guide the search for life on Enceladus and Europa in the future!
The chemical origins of life
The big mystery I tried to resolve during my PhD as a NASA FINESST Fellow at UW-Madison was how the defining processes of life, like the ability to self-propagate and evolve, could arise in collections of chemicals in the complete absence of life. I helped develop a novel approach called chemical ecosystem selection similar to experimental evolution to generate and detect life-like chemical systems. In 2019, we reported the results of experiments conducted on a set of conditions intended to simulate early Earth that displayed patterns consistent with the emergence of life-like chemistry. Work to confirm and further understand these patterns is ongoing.
Engineered protein therapeutics
As a MS student and NIH RISE fellow at CSU-Northridge, I explored the use of tumor-targeted bacteria as chemotherapeutic drug delivery systems. The objective of my thesis was to engineer a non-pathogenic strain of Salmonella (VNP20009) to safely express and deliver protein toxins to cancer cells. I used Aggregatibacter leukotoxin A (LtxA) as the toxin cargo, a pore-forming multigene toxin with specificity to an antigen overexpressed in some metastatic cancers. I also contributed to a study in which Pseudomonas exotoxin A was used to selectively kill breast cancer cells that overexpress epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). We also demonstrated that toxins delivered to cancer cells could be protected by the co-expression of sunflower trypsin inhibitor (SFTI).
Epigenetics and cancer drug resistance
During my senior year at CSU-Long Beach, I was funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to complete a research internship in Dr. WenYong Chen’s cancer biology lab at City of Hope Medical Center. There, I studied the role of epigenetics (the controlled turning on and off of genes) in the acquisition of chemotherapeutic drug resistance by leukemia cells. I used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology to generate mutant leukemia cell lines to test how epigenetic dysregulation in cancer stem cells contributes to drug resistance.
Access my publications here