Acadia Kocher

During my PhD (Yale University) I studied how enhancer sequences evolve across species and contribute to species-specific traits, finding a role for turnover of CpG islands. I worked with comparative epigenomic datasets to characterize broad patterns across many species, as well as with a humanized mouse model of one enhancer to experimentally study the effects of sequence evolution on brain development.

In 2023 I joined the lab of Bas van Steensel to work on gene regulatory elements and the rules that govern their functions.