Awarded in 2019
Home Department: Immunology
Faculty Advisors: Aida Habtezion (Medicine - Gastroenterology & Hepatology), Purvesh Khatri (Medicine - Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Data Science) , and Paul (PJ) Utz (Medicine - Immunology and Rheumatology)

Research Title: Elucidating the Role of Epigenetic Modifications in IBD Pathogenesis and Presentation Using Mass Cytometry

Research Description: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn’s Disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), impacts 3 million US adults and is increasing in incidence. Despite significant associations between IBD and genetics, diet, and the microbiome, its etiology remains unknown. Epigenetics, or the study of non-genetic modifications to the organism’s gene expression, potentially links all three factors but has not been thoroughly studied in IBD. Using a novel single-cell technology, EpiTOF, Lawrence will study the epigenetics of immune cells from patients with IBD using state-of-the-art analytic methods to better understand and identify epigenetic differences in IBD pathology, which could ultimately lead to development of novel and effective therapies for patients with IBD.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Lawrence is a Life Sciences Consultant at L.E.K. Consulting, where he has worked on strategy and due diligence projects across the life sciences industry, including biopharma, pharma services, diagnostics, and medical devices.