Amanda R. Wasylishen PhD

Dr. Wasylishen is an Instructor in the Department of Genetics and seeks to understand the mechanisms that underlie cellular transformation and tumorigenesis. Originally from Canada, she received her BSc in Chemistry from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. She then completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Medical Biophysics at The University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. She worked with Dr. Linda Penn to advance our understanding of the functions and post-translational regulation of the MYC oncogene.

She also identified several residues important for the negative regulation of MYC activity. Dr. Wasylishen joined Dr. Guillermina (Gigi) Lozano’s laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2012, and was promoted to Instructor in 2018. Here her work focuses on understanding the function(s) of epigenetic regulators in pancreas homeostasis and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor suppression using novel genetically engineered mouse models, with the overall goal of identifying the molecular underpinnings of disease.