Epigenetic variation in the genotype-phenotype map
Amy Webster, PhD
I am an NIH F32 Postdoctoral Fellow in Patrick Phillips' lab at the University of Oregon. I received my PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University in May 2021 and was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, advised by Ryan Baugh. Before grad school, I was a Goldwater Scholar and graduated with B.S. degrees in Genetics and Mathematics from the University of Georgia. As a geneticist, I am interested in understanding the basis of inter-individual variation in quantitative traits and the consequences of this variation across generations. This has broad implications from both a health perspective (why are some individuals more likely to have a certain trait or disease?) as well as from an evolutionary perspective (how do individual differences shape population dynamics over time?). I am particularly interested in understanding how differences in the epigenetic regulation of gene expression can both cause and predict phenotypic differences across individuals, how these differences interact with genetic and environmental variation, and how heritable epigenetic effects may shape populations on short and long timescales. For my work, I use a variety of approaches, including mathematics, bioinformatics, molecular biology, statistics, and genetic engineering.