I am a molecular geneticist and neuroscientist who studies how environmental and genetic variations affect the human brain in health and disease. My research group uses a hybrid of human stem cell models, post-mortem tissue and computational approaches to interrogate the contribution of epigenetic and somatic mosaicism to brain diseases. I am enthusiastic to participate as a member in the R25 Research Education Program. As a postdoctoral fellow, I demonstrated that the human brain exhibits extensive genetic variability due to mobile DNA elements and discovered that L1 endonuclease activity mediates large somatic copy number variants in the brain (1). These findings implicate possible mechanisms and consequences for L1-associated somatic variation, suggest that features of somatic mosaicism could be heritable. We are at the initial stages of discovering the landscape of somatic mosaicism in the brain and are the basis for an ongoing work as apart of the Brains Somatic Mosaicism Network. I contributed to the development and application of advanced stem cell modeling and single cell transcriptomics techniques to neuroscience questions in order to better understand the molecular underpinnings of how the brain works in post-mortem tissue (Nature Protocols, 2017), single mouse neurons (Nature Com 2016) and induced pluripotent stem cell models of dopaminergic neurons (2). In my predoctoral work, I contributed to the field of epigenetics and stem cells, where I discovered mechanisms and trans-acting factors by which non-coding RNAs regulate gene expression during X chromosome Inactivation. I discovered mutually exclusive binding of Cdx2 and Oct4 switch imprinted and random X inactivation in embryonic and trophoblast stem cells (3). I identified a repetitive DNA element that regulate imprinted X inactivation in the mouse placenta (4).