Research Interest

Molecular Regulation of Hematopoietic Cell Growth/Differentiation Hematopoiesis is a multi-stage developmental process that is maintained throughout life by a limited number of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), which proliferate, self renew, and differentiate into mature blood cells of all lineages. Central questions about the molecular events that regulate HSC quiescence, survival, self-renewal, and lineage commitment remain to be answered. A significant effort in this field is focused on learning to direct these processes to expand and maintain hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) for the treatment of leukemia and other hematological disorders. Transcription factors are the ultimate downstream mediators of extrinsic signals received by the micro environment and cell intrinsic signals. My Lab is focused on defining how transcriptional regulators promote HSC self renewal and cell specification to multiple hematopoietic cell lineages using stem cell line models; knock-out mice and normal hematopoietic cells. Since transcription factors are frequently deregulated or mutated in leukemia, we also evaluate if specific transcriptional regulators represent potential therapeutic targets. We believe that knowledge of the molecular and cellular regulation of HSC will contribute to 1) an improved understanding of the mechanism(s) that regulate normal HSC development, 2) if deregulation of these processes contributes to hematopoietic malignancies, 3) the development of biopharmaceuticals to treat leukemia, 4) improving methods to transplant bone marrow cells, and to expand HSC to use in regenerative medicine and gene therapy.