Judith is an incoming assistant professor in the Molecular and Computational Biology Department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the development of new experimental tools and computational approaches to decipher how regulatory regions establish communication – a critical process for precise gene expression control in mammalian genomes. Her broader goal is to create regulatory modules that achieve cell type-specific expression from scratch, using entirely synthetic sequences.

Judith received her PhD from Columbia University in the laboratories of Prof. Harmen Bussemaker and Prof. Richard Mann, where she developed in vitro and in vivo methods to study how transcription factors interact with epigenetic DNA modifications and other cofactors to control gene expression. She then pursued post-doctoral studies in the lab of Prof. Bart Deplancke at EPFL, where she worked on computational, genome-wide approaches to understand how sequence context modulates the effect size of non-coding DNA variants. In addition, she developed experimental tools to leverage synthetic genomics to improve deep-learning based models for gene expression and variant effect size prediction.

Judith’s work has received support from multiple funding agencies, including fellowships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, EMBO, and EU’s Horizon program.