Keith Conrad Fernandez

As an undergraduate pursuing my Bachelor of Biomedical Science at the University of Malaya from September 2011 to June 2015, I started my research career working as an assistant in Dr. Azlina Ahmad Annuar’s lab from July to September 2013 where I performed mutational screening of PARKIN and PINK1 genes in patients with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. I then applied for and was accepted into the Biology Undergraduate Summer School program at the University of Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland, investigating the circadian regulation of cell cycle genes in post-mitotic cells in the lab of Steven Brown from July to August 2014. Between September 2014 and June 2015, I undertook my undergraduate research thesis in Dr. Wong’s lab where I cloned the Pdpn (podoplanin) gene and attempted to characterize its physiological and immunological roles in macrophages. During my gap year working in the lab of Athanasios Typas at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, I helped optimized a proteomics-based pipeline that aimed to systematically identify the interactome of Salmonella effector proteins in murine macrophages. In September 2016, I was admitted into the Immunology & Microbial Pathogenesis PhD program at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and joined the lab of Jayanta Chaudhuri at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in July 2017. My current research aims to i) understand the role of structure-selective endonucleases in the maintenance of genome stability in B lymphocytes and ii) elucidate the molecular regulation of antibody diversification using upmutants of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID).

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Origin: Kuala Lumpur

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Hobby: Urban walking, hiking, art history, photography, politics, socioeconomic affairs, science, traveling, exploring the food and cultural scenes (museums and Broadway) in New York City