Meet Jasmin:

Jasmin is a third year PhD Candidate in Medical Genetics who joined the lab in the fall of 2023. Before moving to Vancouver, Jasmin finished her BSc in Health and Disease (Human Biology) with a minor in Bioethics at the University of Toronto in 2022. Outside of the Dennis Lab, she currently serves as the Director of Communications for the Medical Genetics Graduate Student Association and Teaching Assistant for the Trainee Omics Group at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. In her free time, Jasmin enjoys reading, gaming, and staying active. She dreams of becoming a GoodReads influencer and receiving free books.

More about her work in the Dennis Lab:

Through her work, Jasmin aims to provide a comprehensive view of the role of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) in health and disease. HERVs are genomic sequences from ancient retroviral integrations that comprise 8% of the human genome. While long dismissed as “junk DNA”, HERVs are increasingly recognized as drivers of inflammation in viral infections, autoimmune conditions, and neurodegenerative diseases. Multi-omics analysis of HERVs could reveal previously unidentified links between our genome and immune responses.

She will address this through three stages of her PhD thesis. In Aim 1, she will identify insertional polymorphisms of HERV long terminal repeat (LTR) elements and relate them to COVID-19 severity to elucidate their impacts on host responses to infectious diseases. In Aim 2, she will characterize HERV expression in single-cell data from peripheral blood mononuclear cells to predict cell-type specific genetically regulated HERV expression patterns that are associated with elevated risk of autoimmune diseases. In Aim 3, she will identify HERV LTR insertional polymorphisms and determine their effects on gene expression in brain tissue to study their impact on Alzheimer’s disease. Together, her research will inform novel regulatory networks involving HERVs and highlight their potential as therapeutic targets and biomarkers for immune-related diseases.