Kathrin Plath PhD

Kathrin Plath earned her doctorate degree in cell biology from Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) for her work with Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School on how the signal sequence of a secretory protein is recognized by the translocation channel in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. She received fellowships from the Life Sciences Research Foundation and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation for her post-doctoral training at the University of California San Francisco and the Whitehead Institute at MIT, Cambridge. In her postdoctoral research, she uncovered that Polycomb proteins can be recruited to their site of action by long non-coding RNAs, and that this group of transcriptional repressors is important for the maintenance of pluripotency and developmental plasticity through the repression of developmental pathways. She joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California Los Angeles in 2006, where her laboratory studies epigenetic mechanisms that maintain the pluripotent state and control differentiation, with a particular emphasis on chromatin structure and genome organization. Her research also concerns mechanisms of transcription factor-induced reprogramming to the pluripotent state, particularly as it relates to the crosstalk between signaling pathways, chromatin engagement of transcription factors, enhancer activation, and long non-coding RNA function. In addition, she studies X chromosome-inactivation to reveal new paradigms of long-noncoding RNA function in development. Dr. Plath serves on the editorial boards of various journals and is a Director of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.