CRISPR And Sequencing Covid-19 Variants



A discussion with computational biologist and senior scientist, Stacia Wyman, as she talks about her work on a CRISPR-based therapeutic for Sickle Cell Disease, which has recently been approved for a clinical trial.  In the past 18 months working at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, she has also focused on sequencing COVID-19 genomes to monitor the evolution and spread of COVID-19 variants. 

Stacia Wyman is a computational biologist and senior scientist at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. She holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. Her postdoctoral work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center focused on discovering cancer biomarkers in tumor genomes. Prior to the IGI, Dr. Wyman’s work focused on discovering biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease in families with Huntington's and Parkinson’s disease at the Gladstone Institutes.
Rosetta Costantino was born and raised in Verbicaro, a small wine-producing hill town in Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. Influenced by her parents, her father a master cheesemaker and winemaker, who tended her family’s olive groves, vineyards and farm, and her mother who knew how to live from the land, how to grow vegetables and preserve them for the winter months, and how to make bread and friselle from scratch. After 20 years of working in Silicon Valley, Rosetta retired and became a stay-at-home mom, honing the kitchen skills that she learned from her mother and grandmothers. Then, in 2004 an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Calabria from Scratch”, was written by celebrated food writer Janet Fletcher. It detailed how Rosetta’s family kept all the traditions of Calabria in a small corner of Oakland, California. Working on this article inspired Rosetta to share the cooking of her native land. She now offers cooking classes on a variety of topics like holiday delicacies, making ricotta, and preserving summer’s bounty, plus classes from other regions in Southern Italy: Sicily, Basilicata, Puglia, and Campania. She has also written several books about the region’s foods and specialties, as well as everything that Calabria has to offer. Her latest book is entitled “Southern Italian Desserts.”
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mens conscia recti

a mind aware of what is right