Joan Pulupa, Ph.D.

Joan Pulupa is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Stavros Lomvardas in the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in physics and biological sciences with a minor in chemistry from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She went on to complete her Ph.D. with Dr. Sanford M. Simon in the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics at the Rockefeller University. Pulupa was a recipient of the Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Studies by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2015.

Pulupa is interested in developing and using live-cell imaging technologies to study how changes in genome organization and storage affect cell differentiation and gene expression. During her Ph.D., she developed techniques in fluorescence polarization microscopy that enabled her to characterize the dynamics of the nuclear pore, a macromolecular assembly that controls the flow of molecules into and out of the nucleus. In her postdoctoral research, she will use live-cell imaging to study the relationship between changing genome architecture and gene regulation in olfactory sensory neurons, a cell type that depends on proper genome folding to establish its molecular identity.