Dr. Sylvia Mahara

Sylvia did her undergraduate (Hons) in Genetics with Prof. Stephen Jane at Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, where she systematically characterized defective erythroid lineage cells in a phenotype-driven mouse ENU mutagenesis screen. For her PhD in Cancer Biology, she moved to the Genome Institute of Singapore at A*STAR, where she worked with Prof. Yu Qiang to delineate functional switch of Polycomb proteins from canonical to non-canonical role in cancer model. Through her first postdoc in Australia (2016), she developed her expertise in CRISPR screen and she joined Prof. Rob Klose (2019) in Oxford, UK, to further her interest in Polycomb-mediated gene repression by employing genome-wide CRISPR screens in stem cells. During this period, she started to develop an interest in 3D genome regulation. Sylvia subsequently joined the Feldmann lab in March 2022 to explore her current research interest in understanding the mechanisms controlling long-range interactions using orthogonal high-throughput sequencing and unbiased CRISPR screen approaches.