Marybeth Baumgartner

Postdoc

Marybeth is interested in the genetic underpinnings of brain evolution and development. Her interest in this topic was sparked as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, where she studied biology with a focus on organismal evolution. She then joined the lab of Dr. Rahul Kanadia at the University of Connecticut to study the minor spliceosome, a highly conserved RNA splicing complex linked to multiple neurodevelopmental disorders. In her thesis work, Marybeth established the role of the minor spliceosome in regulating cortical development using a mouse model. As a post-doc in the Noonan lab, her research focuses on parsing the genetics of cortical expansion in human evolution. She is developing humanized mouse models to study the impact of regulatory elements with uniquely human activity on gene expression and cortical development. Using these mouse models, Marybeth aims to link human-specific genetic changes to uniquely human features of cortical development.