I am an advanced research assistant, interested in understanding the genetic basis of autoimmunity in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), by investigating how genetic variants can induce immune cell specific differential gene expression. To accomplish this, I implement primary cell culturing, flow cytometry, FACS, single cell RNA-sequencing, single cell CITE-sequencing and computational analyses.
SLE is a heterogenous autoimmune disease affecting around 5 million people world-wide. Only two drugs have been approved for use in SLE over the last 60 years. This has resulted in efforts to increase our understanding of the disease’s aetiopathogenesis, so that we can develop new treatments. Thus, the goal of our project is to identify novel gene drug targets, by generating high-throughput single cell multi-omic data and producing single cell eQTL maps of the immune system in SLE.