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We are a research laboratory in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and are a part of the larger Gene Regulation Group and Broad Stem Cell Center at UCLA. Our main interest is to understand how, during development, cells progress from an undifferentiated state with broad cell fate potential to a committed, differentiated state with restricted developmental potential.

The lab is particularly interested in understanding how developmental cues induce changes in chromatin structure and we study the epigenetic changes that occur during differentiation of pluripotent cells or reprogramming to pluripotency. To address these questions, we are using a combination of mammalian tissue culture systems, fluorescence microscopy, biochemistry and mass spectrometry, RNAi and overexpression approaches, genome-wide DNA microarray technologies and next generation sequencing, and transgenic/knockout mouse models.

The chromatin-regulatory processes we study are also often deregulated in diseases. Therefore, an important extension of our work on epigenetic regulation of gene expression during development is to analyze the contribution of chromatin-based mechanisms to disease states.