Dr. Jimenez’s scientific career started as a community college student in Santa Monica, California, where she was inspired at a 4-Day Recombinant DNA Workshop at UCLA. Not all students, especially community college students, actually get the chance to experience science in a real laboratory. She was thrilled to be selected for it and participate in the special four-day program at UCLA. There, she gained hands-on experience cloning a plasmid and learned about research opportunities for undergraduates.
She was selected for the UCLA Bridge Program for Community College students prior to transferring as a junior at UCLA to perform research on mitochondrial protein import in Dr. Carla Koehler’s laboratory. As a result of her accomplishments in the Bridge Program, she was invited to apply for and received the NIH Minority Access to Research Careers Research Trainee Fellowship (MARC), one of the most prestigious research awards for undergraduates at UCLA. This award enabled her to continue performing research and prepare high-caliber graduate training. By the end of her 2-year trainee appointment, she received an award for her research at the UC California Alliance for Minority Participation Symposium, the UCLA Dean’s Prize, the Elma Gonzales Award for Outstanding Scientific Research by the director of the UCLA MARC program, and the UCLA Women for Change Award.
Her drive as an undergraduate aided in her acceptance into the Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics Doctoral Program at Johns Hopkins University. She applied for and received the prestigious NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Pre-doctoral Fellowship, which funded her research in Dr. Mark Van Doren’s laboratory. There, her research focused on gaining a comprehensive understanding of a key sex determination gene and how it contributes to sexual dimorphism in a whole organism. Outside of the laboratory, she was recognized as an outstanding laboratory science teacher and was awarded the DuPont Teaching Award for Developmental Biology.
After receiving a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Jimenez went on to complete a postdoc at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health. During the course of her graduate work, she became fascinated with animal regeneration. Her core research goals for a post-doctoral project were directed toward understanding the cellular and molecular basis for animal regeneration and tissue repair. She was especially interested in identifying novel genes with roles in regeneration using an in vivo model system which is why she turned to the zebrafish.
For her postdoctoral training under the mentorship of Dr. Shawn Burgess at National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jimenez studied tissue regeneration and repair from the standpoint of adult hearing regeneration in zebrafish. The zebrafish has a much higher capacity to regenerate tissues, including the brain, CNS, and peripheral neurons, following injury. Few regeneration-specific genes have been identified in zebrafish and even less is known about how genes are epigenetically regulated to control hair cell-specific regeneration in auditory and vestibular sensory epithelia. During her postdoctoral appointment, she generated a novel transgenic zebrafish to permit conditional and selective ablation of hair cells in the adult inner ear. On adult zebrafish that have undergone hair cell ablation, she investigated the epigenome and transcriptome of single-cells from the inner ear at consecutive time-points following hair cell ablation. Using these single-cell analyses, she identified a 2 kb DNA sequence element upstream of sox2 that acquires accessibility during hair cell regeneration in a cell type specific manner. Finally, Dr. Jimenez used CRISPR-Cas9 editing to knockout the predicted upstream regulator of sox2 and found that deletion of the upstream enhancer resulted in a hair cell regeneration defect but did not significantly impact development. Dr. Jimenez’s long-term goal is to uncover the gene regulatory networks involved in vertebrate inner ear regeneration.
Learn more about research in the Jimenez Lab.
Outside of the laboratory, Erin enjoys Muay Thai and Kickboxing.
Resources
Undergraduate Research Opportunities at JHU