BodyText6
Bailey Weatherbee, Graduated Spring 2019
For the past year (2019 - 2020), Bailey has been working in Dr. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz's lab in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience as a First-year PhD student, funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust. Currently, she has become involved in several projects at varying stages. The Zernicka-Goetz’s lab recently had a manuscript accepted to Nature Communications, with Bailey being the co-first author on which investigates the effect of specific aneuploidies on the developmental potential of human embryos. During the COVID-19 lock-down, she was also able to submit an invited review to Developmental Biology regarding the use of human stem cells to model aspects of pre-gastrulation human embryogenesis, as well as have a short first-author paper on the expression of genes related to coronavirus infection in the early embryo accepted into Open Biology. Currently, she has started back in the lab working limited hours, as the lab is preparing a revised manuscript on single-cell sequencing of post-implantation human embryos and the role of certain signaling pathways and domains for resubmission to Nature Cell Biology. In addition to these papers and projects, she has started her own projects with a focus on (1) reprogramming human ESCs to extra-embryonic stem cell types as a way to investigate transcription factor networks underlying cell identity and (2) defining key signaling factors and transcription factors in human amniotic epithelium specification and differentiation. These are longer-term projects on which Bailey has taken the lead on and will continue on through her PhD.
Outside of the lab, Bailey has been active in the Gates Cambridge Community, participating in many social and professional development events, which have been very useful. Recently, she was elected as the Community Officer on the Gates Cambridge Council. In this role, she is particularly charged with organizing programming aimed at promoting anti-racism and anti-discrimination both to improve the community at Cambridge and to equip Scholars' with the knowledge needed to push for positive change in their careers and daily lives.
Bailey enjoys keeping in touch with Dr. Salil Lachke and members of the Lachke lab. Since graduating from UD, she successfully published some of her findings from her undergraduate thesis in Human Genetics, which she is very excited about!