Dr. Kamte is am a junior postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Wells at the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed her PhD from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh under the mentorship of Dr. Lauren A. O'Donnell. Her current research focus is to identify various ways pathogens can disrupt neurodevelopment and lead to abnormalities. In the Wells lab her goal is to identify if genetic heterogeneity can determine the fate of neural stem cells in the face of environmental perturbations such as viral infections. Specifically, she wants to determine if specific single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) can make a donor more or less sensitive to the impacts of infection and inflammation. To do this, we employ novel platforms such as "cell villages" and "chimeroid villages" where we pool several donor hiPSC derived NPCs into a single cell culture environment and then use computational techniques to identify what cells/transcriptomics belong to a specific donor.

For her talk, she will focus on how we construct cell villages and chimeroids and then focus on how to use these models to answer their research questions.

For more information on the Wells lab and the research we do you can check out our lab website - https://wellslab.dgsom.ucla.edu.