2004 to 2012 (not currently accepting students on this project.)

This project has centered on the regulatory pathways that orchestrate chromosome behaviours vital to the proper partitioning of genetic material during cell division. A failure to proportion genetic material equally to each daughter cell leads to cells with incorrect genome complements (aneuploidy), a situation associated with tumorigenesis and birth defects. In previous work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute, I studied mutations that disrupt the separation of replicated sister chromatids at the metaphase to anaphase transition in mitosis during embryogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster. I expanded this research to examine the role of these genes in meiosis by identifying female sterile alleles of each gene. An aspect of my research has focused on the process of chromosome condensation and the role of the condensin complex in mitosis and meiosis using a large collection of mutations in the dcap-g gene, which codes for a condensin subunit.

Undergraduate thesis projects are focussed upon using classic genetics techniques such as deficiency mapping, complementation, and meiotic mapping techniques to identify candidate gene loci.