Faculty

I’m originally from Miami, FL and my love of bright colors and good Cuban food will never fade. I received my undergraduate degree in Biology from Davidson College in North Carolina, where I did an honors thesis investigating the role of the pesticide malathion on spinal cord neural patterning using zebrafish embryos. From there, I went on to pursue my graduate degree in Developmental Biology at Stanford University. I studied the molecular basis of the evolution of two distinct adaptive traits: loss of bony armor plates in freshwater stickleback fish and the rapid expansion of the human brain. For my postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, I shifted gears to focus on the molecular regulators of blood-brain barrier (BBB) function using zebrafish. This allowed me to characterize the developmental pattern of vertebrate BBB functionalization across many scales, from subcellular compartments to entire tissue levels, and with live imaging, I was able to characterize the dynamic nature of BBB leakage, both developmentally and in genetic mutants. In the O’Brown lab, we will continue to capitalize on the unique advantages of the zebrafish system to uncover novel molecular and cellular regulators of BBB function, with the ultimate goal of improving human therapies of brain diseases, both to open a sealed BBB to allow better drug penetration into the brain and to seal a leaky BBB, as seen in many neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to prevent further damage to the brain.