Emma is from Rochester, NY, USA and received a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 2019. During her undergraduate studies, she performed research with Professor Alanna Schepartz aiming to expand the genetic code by evolving a tRNA synthetase to allow for incorporation of beta amino acids into translated proteins.
She then pursued her PhD in Chemical Biology the lab of Professor Brian Liau at Harvard University, where she received the NSF GRFP fellowship. In the Liau lab Emma used high throughput mutagenesis and protein biochemistry to study the molecular mechanism of the dominant negative R882H mutation to DNA methyltransferase 3A, which is common in haematological malignancies. In doing so, she provided strong evidence that the R882H mutation promotes protein oligomerization by altering the protein dynamics at a key protein-protein interface, causing a dominant negative effect. Emma received her PhD in Chemical Biology in 2026 for this work.
Now a postdoctoral fellow in the Lehner lab, Emma is interested in understanding sequence-function relationships in dynamic and/or disordered protein domains, including how these domains can alter the properties of highly structured domains in the same protein sequence.