Delighted to be back at the New York Academy of Medicine celebrating the achievements of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai MD/PhD students!

Enormous congratulations to Dr. Rebecca Signer, who successfully defended her PhD thesis today!

Rebecca's thesis examines the differences between eating disorders, obesity, thinness, and depression using a case-case gwas, and then delves into how our BMI can change regulation of gene expression.

Some of Huckins Lab (and the next generation!) braved the cold on Friday to fight for Science! #FundtheNIH #WomenInScience

Huckins Lab has a fun new holiday tradition- gingerbread houses! Complete with DNA roof tiles, pathways, and gumdrop histones 🍭🧬❄️☃️

Finally, we looked for sex effects- both directly, in postmortem tissue, and using an iPS model, this time exposed to estrogen as well as HCort, a stress hormone.

Read our preprint for all the details! doi.org/10.1101/2024...

We replicated postmortem trauma-associated genes in an iPS cohort exposed to synthetic stress hormones (from work led by another grad student, Carina Seah, left), and found that iPS replicate childhood trauma associations

We also identify modules associated with different traumas (left), and show that these patterns are different across brain regions (right)

We found that different traumas have distinct transcriptomic signatures in the brain, with different patterns of genes impacted depending on the type and developmental timing of the trauma

Emily's thesis focused on the role of trauma in psychiatric disease, including a detailed study of trauma signatures in the brain, in collaboration with Matt Girgenti, preprinted here: doi.org/10.1101/2024...