I trained for my PhD with Dr. Chris Doe at the University of Oregon where I worked on how neural stem cells in the developing fly embryo can give rise to different progeny on consecutive divisions (multipotency). In my thesis I described a mechanism of “temporal patterning” with cascades of transcription factors that define temporal windows. This training gave me a deep interest in stem cell biology, developmental biology, and neural differentiation.

As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Alejandro Sánchez-Alvarado at the University of Utah, I switched from Drosophila to a non-traditional model system: the freshwater planarian. I was interested in following up my neurobiology and stem cell work from flies in a system that can be used to study gene function and stem cells in adult animals in vivo. I was interested in defining how planarians deal with proliferation control as adults, as well as conserved mechanisms of stem cell biology and neural regeneration. In the Sánchez lab, I showed that planarians use canonical tumor suppressor pathways to control proliferation, suggesting they would be a useful model for the study of stemness in cancers – which is indeed the case.

Over the past 12 years, I have run a successful lab at the Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto. However, I was recently recruited back to the US in the fall of 2021 to Oregon Health & Science University in the Department of Pediatric Neurooncology, with joint appointments at the Vollum Institute and the Knight Cancer Institute. This opportunity is a perfect fit because I was specifically recruited to continue our work on the biology of stemness and identification of normal stemness pathways that have gone awry in human brain tumors as well as our work on fundamental neuro- and glio-genesis using planarians. On the cancer side, my lab uses comparative genomics and functional screens to find new regulators of stemness that are also conserved in evolution and drive cancer stem cells. On the neurogenesis side, we are trying to identify the neural stem cells and pathways of neurogenesis in planarians during both homeostasis and regeneration. Together, we take unique approaches to long-standing unknowns in neural cancers and neurobiology.