Lena Annika Street

Previous Institution: Columbia University

I completed my undergraduate at Columbia, where I studied biology and music. While at Columbia I worked in the Hunt lab on the epitope engineering project. I then moved on to complete a masters in biology at NYU where I did my thesis work in the Ercan lab which studies X chromosome dosage compensation in C. elegans. My thesis focused on how recruitment elements cooperate to recruit the Dosage Compensation Complex to both X chromosomes in hermaphrodites; this story was incorporated into Albritton et. al. 2017. After completing my masters I stayed on in the Ercan lab working on a project to determine how chromatin modifications are associated with X chromosome transcriptional repression in dosage compensation (this paper will be submitted soon). While in the Ercan lab, I also became proficient in bioinformatics analysis methods and am doing all the analysis for my paper.

I am primarily interested in transcriptional regulation, whether at the level of chromatin marks, chromatin organization, DNA binding proteins, or mRNA regulation. I particularly like these questions because they can be asked in so many different systems and contexts. In the Ercan lab we used dosage compensation as a model to study how SMCs can dial down transcription levels two fold. However, I would also be interested in studying how transcription is regulated in development, or cancer, or other diseases, or in other wild type contexts. Most of my recent work has been seq-heavy and this has given me the opportunity to learn bioinformatics and several programming languages. I really enjoy doing both wet and dry lab work and would like to continue to do so during my PhD if appropriate to the question.