Bio:

Flo did her undergraduate degree in Chemistry at UC Berkeley and started her scientific career at Genentech in South San Francisco in 2014. She worked in various different areas of early research and process development, focusing on the development of antibody cancer therapeutics. After three years at Genentech, she went on to pursue her PhD in Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in 2017 under the mentorship of Jay Shendure and Lea Starita. During her PhD, she fell in love with genomic technology development, and developed two multiplex single-cell and bulk functional genomics methods to study and better understand gene regulatory architecture and consequences of genetic variation. Her work revealed novel cis-regulatory element-target links, and led to the identification of candidate gRNAs for use in cis-regulation therapy which leverages CRISPR activation to rescue haploinsufficient phenotypes. Her later work using prime editing to install single nucleotide variants in selected oncogenes led to the identification of potentially novel drug resistance variants in the EGFR gene.

She cannot wait to continue working in the genomic technology development space to further our ability to use novel genome editing methods to write, record, and read information encoded in genomic DNA in increasingly complex model systems and to build novel computational algorithms to interpret these data. Outside of her scientific career, she is an avid cyclist, skier, and outdoor enthusiast, and is happiest spending time in the mountains!