Christy Luong

Christy is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab who is interested in understanding how environmental chemical exposures may potentially influence early human brain development and contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk. Her research, in collaboration with MSSR at UCLA and the Wells lab, focuses on developing and applying high-throughput screening approaches to evaluate thousands of environmental compounds in neural progenitor cells and neurons derived from human iPSCs from patients with ASD. Using high-throughput culturing and robotics systems followed by single-cell RNA sequencing, she will profile transcriptomic changes to identify how individual chemicals perturb the gene regulatory networks relevant to neurodevelopment. With this work, the team aims to gain insight into how chemical exposures induces changes in early neurodevelopment and how the impact of exposures varies across genotypes to identify likely gene-environment interactions and exposure windows that can be measure and mitigated in the future.