Rebecca Starble, PhD

Rebecca received her B.A. in Biology from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University in Andrew Xiao's lab. During her Ph.D., she studied epigenetic mechanisms of tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistance in lung adenocarcinoma. She is now a Yale School of Medicine Science Fellow in the Department of Pathology, where she studies mechanisms of oncogene amplification and structural variation in tumorigenesis. Through a combination of imaging, genomics, and proteomics approaches, she hopes to uncover novel factors that promote oncogene amplification to drive cancer progression. She is particularly interested in the generation and regulation of unique structural variants such as extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), which are megabase-long, plasmid-like molecules that can be highly amplified due to their circular structure. Her long-term goal is to therapeutically exploit mechanisms of oncogene amplification in oncogene-driven cancers.