Research

I investigate how maternal exposures, metabolic conditions, and genetic variation shape the prenatal environment, placental gene regulation, and offspring health. My placenta-specific long-read transcriptome reference provides a foundation for resolving individual transcript isoforms. I am building multi-ancestry regulatory maps to examine how PFAS exposure, gestational diabetes, and maternal obesity relate to placental expression and parent-of-origin regulation.

A complementary question is how maternal genetic influences acting through pregnancy differ from variants inherited by the child. I am developing family-based analyses using transmitted and non-transmitted alleles to separate these pathways, with an interest in neurodevelopment and childhood cancer. I develop ICONIC to assess causal assumptions in observational multi-omics using genetic instruments and negative controls. Alongside these analyses, I am developing functional follow-up strategies in placental organoids to test candidate regulatory mechanisms. The goal is to distinguish associations from mechanisms linking maternal influences to offspring health.

Nutritive tissues mediate resource transfer between mothers and offspring, creating a setting in which parental genetic interests can diverge. I investigate how this conflict shapes gene regulation in animals, focusing on placental mammals and comparative questions in live-bearing fishes. I ask whether independent origins of placentation reveal shared regulatory pressures, and how parent-of-origin regulation and transposable-element-derived sequences contribute to these systems.

From social behavior and reproductive division of labor in eusocial insects to maternal–offspring resource allocation in placentas, I study how parental genomes shape gene regulation and development. I combine reciprocal crosses, allele-specific genomic analyses, isoform-resolution genomics, and comparative regulatory analyses to examine how evolutionary conflict shapes regulatory variation. I ask when similar selective pressures produce similar molecular solutions and how those solutions influence development.