Lia is a new PiNBAC trainee who graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in biology and dance. During her undergraduate career, she spent three years in Dawn Carone’s lab studying aberrant gene expression exclusive to cancer, specifically identifying cell division defects due to Human satellite II expression. After graduating, she joined Douglas Wallace’s lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia exploring the biological mechanisms underlying the rare neuro-metabolomic disorder entitled MEPAN syndrome. During PiNBAC, she was a member of both Ben Deverman’s and Beth Stevens’ labs with the aim of combining viral and genetic techniques to develop AAV capsids for microglia. She is ecstatic to be at the Broad Institute and to learn and collaborate with the large array of talented scientists!