Christina Markunas

I attended North Carolina State University for my undergrad where I majored in Biological Sciences with a minor in Genetics. The summer of my junior year, I participated in the Summers of Discovery program at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Mike Resnick’s lab where I used a synthetic lethal in Saccharomyces cerevisae as a tool for understanding the function of certain genes. I then joined Jack Taylor’s lab at the NIEHS, which is where I stayed my senior year of college and for one year following graduation. In the Taylor lab, I primarily worked on a project that studied the functional effects that certain nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms had on double strand break repair kinetics in humans. My main research interest is in applying a variety of genomic approaches to better understand the genetics of human disease. I chose to attend Duke University for graduate school because of its strength in human genetics research and the enthusiasm of the faculty.

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