Dr. Patrick is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M School of Medicine. Dr. Patrick received her Ph.D. from Yale University (under the mentorship of Dr. Christian Tschudi) and did her postdoc training at University of California, San Francisco (with Drs. Christine Guthrie and Nevan Krogan). Her lab is broadly interested in post-transcriptional regulation of innate immune gene expression in macrophages. Despite the critical role RNA processing plays in controlling mRNA abundance and maturation, most of what we know about gene expression in immune cells is limited to the steps of transcription and translation. The “in between” steps in the life of an RNA—splicing, polyadenylation, modification, editing, export, etc.—are also hugely important determinants in directing protein output and thus, immune outcomes.
With a strong background in pre-mRNA splicing and chromatin remodeling, Dr. Patrick is keen to bring a new perspective as an RNA biologist to the innate immunity and cytokine biology fields. Currently, the Patrick lab is working to uncover the role of RNA binding proteins in shaping the macrophage transcriptome following pathogen sensing. Their work has implicated several splicing factors in the SR and hnRNP families in controlling immune outcomes via unappreciated mechanisms like repressing intron removal and directing alternative splicing. The lab also has a growing interest in how membraneless organelles are dynamically regulated by—and may themselves help control—macrophage activation.