Postdoctoral Scholar
University of California San Diego
I am a postdocotral fellow at UC San Diego. My academic training and research experience has provided me with excellent background in multiple biological disciplines including veterinary medicine, animal science, reproduction, and molecular biology. During my undergraduate, I investigated the animal welfare status of cattle raised in Nepal. As a master’s student in animal science, I conducted research with Dr. Birendra Mishra to identify novel transcriptomic markers of egg formation in poultry. During my doctoral training with Dr. Fuller Bazer, I became interested in metabolic pathways and energy homeostasis in animal reproduction. First, I investigated the roles of one-carbon units and creatine in sheep reproduction. I demonstrated, for the first time, that the ovine uterus and placenta can synthesize and potentially transport creatine throughout gestation. My research also showed novel findings that one-carbon metabolism is important for ovine conceptus development during the peri-implantation period of pregnancy. Following my passion for comparative reproductive biology, I grabbed the opportunity to investigate creatine metabolism in pigs in Dr. Bazer’s lab, as a postdoctoral research associate. During my first year of postdoctoral training, I found that porcine uterus and placenta could synthesize and utilize creatine and that this pathway may be different in male and female placentas. The manuscript for this project is currently in preparation. For my second postdoc, I got the opportunity to combine my interests in reproduction, epigenetics, and stem cell biology in Dr. Francesca Soncin’s lab at University of California – San Diego, by using human placenta and trophoblast stem cells. Since June 2023, I have been investigating the epigenetic regulation of placental development using primary trophoblasts and trophoblast stem cells from human placenta. I am also working with human placenta and trophoblast stem cells on the role of creatine metabolism in human placental development. My long-term goal is to build up a collaborative and comprehensive research program that combines nutrition, epigenetics, and gene expression to investigate and advance our understanding of fetal-placental development in normal and diseased pregnancies.