Jillian Ness Receives 2024 Marion R. Kramer Scholarship
Jillian Ness of the Wunderlich Lab is one of the recipients of the Biology Department’s 2024 Marion R. Kramer Scholarship. Jillian and her team studied how enhancers work in development, focusing on redundant enhancers, or “shadow enhancers,” linked to developmental genes. These enhancers are remarkably abundant in animals and can compensate under conditions of stress to drive normal development.
She is exploring how these enhancers function, as well as how they are created and maintained in animal genomes. Her work involves creating simplified enhancer models in Drosophila and analyzing how they work. In parallel, she performs evolutionary studies on shadow enhancer sequences to understand genomic events from which the sequences originate. Ultimately, she aims to understand enhancer sequences to improve predictions of perturbations that lead to developmental disease in embryos.
Read the full announcement here.
Congratulations, Jillian!