Jennifer VanOudenhove

Post-Doc

B.S.E. Chemical Engineering, UCONN (2009)

B.S. Molecular and Cell Biology, UCONN (2009)

PhD. Cell Biology, UMASS Medical School (2016)

Dr. VanOudenhove was awarded her undergraduate degrees in 2009 from the University of Connecticut. While at UCONN, she performed her Honors thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. James Cole, where she studied the structure of the protein PKR in solution using small angle x-ray and neutron scattering (SAXS and SANS). She attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the program in Cell Biology, completing her PhD in 2016. Her doctoral work in the lab of Dr. Gary Stein focused on the early events that regulate commitment of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)/iPSCs to specific lineages. One of her dissertation projects involved investigation of the mechanism behind a G2 cell cycle pause during the first cell cycle after induction of differentiation that was required for specification to endoderm. Another project was elucidating the role of RUNX1 in epithelial marker suppression via the TGFβ pathway, as part of an epithelial to mesenchymal transition during hESC differentiation. In January 2017, she joined the Cotney lab as a post-doctoral fellow, where she is currently working on a project that uses functional genomics techniques to analyze the chromatin remodeler code of the Chromodomain Helicase DNA-binding (CHD) family of proteins during development.