School of Medicine
Showing 21-26 of 26 Results
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Brooke Howitt
Associate Professor of Pathology
BioDr. Howitt is a gynecologic and sarcoma pathologist, with academic interests in gynecologic mesenchymal tumors and morphologic and clinical correlates of molecular alterations in gynecologic neoplasia.
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Michael R. Howitt
Assistant Professor of Pathology and of Microbiology and Immunology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur lab is broadly interested in how intestinal microbes shape our immune system to promote both health and disease. Recently we discovered that a type of intestinal epithelial cell, called tuft cells, act as sentinels stationed along the lining of the gut. Tuft cells respond to microbes, including parasites, to initiate type 2 immunity, remodel the epithelium, and alter gut physiology. Surprisingly, these changes to the intestine rely on the same chemosensory pathway found in oral taste cells. Currently, we aim to 1) elucidate the role of specific tuft cell receptors in microbial detection. 2) To understand how protozoa and bacteria within the microbiota impact host immunity. 3) Discover how tuft cells modulate surrounding cells and tissue.
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Chris C.S. Hsiung
Instructor, Pathology
BioI am a molecular biologist and laboratory medicine physician. I am interested in understanding how cells turn genes on or off, and engineering ways we can turn genes on or off for biological discovery and therapeutic benefit.
In my postdoctoral work advised by Dr. Luke Gilbert (Arc Institute), I developed multiAsCas12a (multiplexed transcriptional interference Acidaminococcus Cas12a), a new functional genomics platform capable of higher-order combinatorial chromatin targeting of multiple coding and non-coding genetic elements per cell, including in pooled 6-plex CRISPRi screens. I proposed a group testing experimental framework to efficiently survey higher-order combinatorial spaces of genetic perturbations. I applied this approach to discover new enhancer elements and dissect the combinatorial logic of cis-regulatory elements. This work is available as a preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.18.558350v2
In my prior work as an MD-PhD student co-advised by Dr. Arjun Raj and Dr. Gerd Blobel at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, I led several studies focused on how gene regulatory information is maintained or altered through mitosis in mammalian cells, using epigenomics methods, single-molecule RNA imaging, and computational analysis.
