Lydia Fozo

Lydia is an MD-PhD student who was born and raised in Cameroon. She earned her degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. During her undergraduate years, Lydia conducted research at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, where she applied computational tools to build system networks for resource management and studied connectome-based biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

She later joined the Zitnik Lab at Harvard Medical School where she applied bioinformatics methods to identify liver cancer disease gene candidates from protein interaction networks. Subsequently, Lydia worked in the Engle Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she used transcriptomic and epigenomic profiling to study signaling and gene regulatory events underlying the formation of cranial motor neurons and their circuits during embryonic development. This research aimed to understand the role of coding and noncoding variants in Mendelian disorders.

Lydia is passionate about leveraging computational and systems biology to explore the complex mechanisms of non-coding elements and their regulatory functions in disease states, aiming to inform novel therapies.