Kevin Child

Postdoctoral Fellow

Genetics and Genome Sciences

Dr. Kevin Child was awarded his undergraduate degree in Biomolecular Science in 2013 from Central Connecticut State University.  While at CCSU, he worked in Dr. Thomas King’s laboratory, where he studied two different Jax mouse strains with a spontaneous mutation that resulted in abnormal hair growth to identify the mutant gene by using the positional cloning technique. This work resulted in two publications.

After completion of his bachelor’s degree he was accepted at Tufts University for his doctorate where he worked under Dr. James Schwob. For his thesis work he developed a mouse model of olfactory aging and using molecular biology techniques and fluorescent microscopy uncovered a mechanism for the loss of olfaction where exhaustion of basal stem cells through accelerated neuronal turnover lead to large regions lacking olfactory neurons which would eventually undergo respiratory metaplasia. This research led to another publication.

Currently he is working in Dr. Justin Cotney’s lab at the University of Connecticut as a Postdoctoral Fellow where he is investigating the role of alternative splicing and differential transcript utilization in the embryonic period of heart and craniofacial development. So far, he has identified many genes which have significant alternative splicing events in both tissues and has identified many novel transcripts some of which appear to have either tissue or temporal specific expression during embryonic development. Continuing with this work he would like to also identify the proteins involved in the regulation of these splicing events during this period of development and investigate the role of some of these novel transcripts through genetic manipulation of H9 derived cardiomyocytes and heart organoids.