Allison Bardin

Allison Bardin received a B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she did doctoral work on cell cycle regulation in budding yeast with Dr. Angelika Amon. For her post-doctoral work, she went abroad to the lab of Dr. François Schweisguth in Paris, France.  There, using the Drosophila model system, she investigated mechanisms of Notch signaling and cell fate control.  Since late 2010, she has directed a research group at the Institut Curie focusing on regulation of cell fate and genome stability of Drosophila adult intestinal stem cells. Using a combination of fly genetics and genomics, work in the Bardin lab is centered around addressing the following questions: How is gene expression controlled allowing cell fate switches during lineage decisions? What are the roles of chromatin states in this process? What are the cellular mechanisms that protect the stem cell genome from mutation? What happens when endogenous DNA damage alters genomic integrity? Aging and disease states such as inflammation and cancer are intimately linked with stem cell genome alteration both at the genetic and epigenetic level, therefore findings in the lab may help understand these processes and how they could be altered.