Marina Feric

I am a postdoctoral fellow in Tom Misteli's lab at the NCI/NIH, and I earned my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Princeton University under the mentorship of Clifford Brangwynne. As a graduate student, I discovered the biophysical mechanisms needed to organize nuclear condensates in the growing frog egg. I showed how nuclear actin serves as a scaffold to prevent gravitational sedimentation and how the nucleolus behaves as a multi-phase condensate. As a postdoc, I am investigating the role of phase separation in the assembly of nucleoprotein complexes called mitochondrial nucleoids. My current work focuses on how the mitochondrial genome behaves as a transcriptional condensate, suggesting that phase separation is an evolutionary conserved principle in genome organization. My long-term goal is to lead a research team that explores how the biophysical interactions across multiple scales, molecular, organellar and cellular, contribute to proper organization and how their dysregulation gives rise to disease.