Affiliation: Thomas Jefferson University

Sruti Patoori received her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2020. Her doctoral advisor was Dr. Mark Emerson and her work pertained to the role of gene regulatory elements in directing the fate of early-born retinal cell types.

In particular, her doctoral work focused on cis-regulatory elements active in a fate-restricted progenitor population that preferentially generates cone photoreceptors and horizontal cells in the chick retina. She also conducted comparative studies development studies between mouse and thirteen-lined ground squirrel retinae and between owl and chick retinae. The goal of this work was to understand how evolution can act on developmental gene regulatory networks to generate retinae with more cone photoreceptors and horizontal cells.

As of July 2020, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Marco Trizzino, in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Thomas Jefferson University. Dr. Patoori is continuing to study neuronal development in her postdoctoral work, with a focus on understanding how gene regulatory networks in hippocampal development differ between humans and chimpanzees. This work makes use of iPSC models to investigate how the evolution of this developmental process has shaped the human brain.