Sepideh Khorasanizadeh

Biography

Sepideh Khorasanizadeh, Ph.D., joined Sanford-Burnham in 2010. Previously, she was on the faculty of the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia from 1999 to 2010, studying biophysical properties of chromatin, epigenetic and transcription factors. Prior to becoming a faculty member in Virginia, she was a Leukemia Society special fellow at University of Maryland Baltimore County in Michael Summers’ group focusing on NMR structure determination of retroviral capsid proteins. Sepideh obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, completing her thesis at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where in Dr. Heinrich Roder’s group she studied the folding mechanism of ubiquitin by spectroscopy. Sepideh was born in Iran, and graduated from high school in Tehran in 1985. Serendipitously, she entered University of Massachusetts where college level chemistry courses ignited a lifetime passion in laboratory research, whereas summer positions at Nestle research lab instilled interest in food sources and cooking.

Research Interest

A significant body of research suggests that therapeutic targeting of specific gene expression pathways may be key to personalized medicine. Since 1999, the Khorasanizadeh laboratory has devoted its efforts to investigating epigenetic mechanisms, the emerging study of changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the DNA sequence. By applying powerful tools of biochemistry and biophysics they have discovered gene-switching mechanisms that control transcription phenomena.