Monika Mehta

Monika Mehta heads the R&D unit at the CCR-Sequencing Facility at Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, Frederick, Maryland. She received her bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from the University of Delhi, followed by master’s degree in Biotechnology from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. She obtained her Ph. D. from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, where she studied the metabolic pathways of the malarial parasite. Her postdoctoral research under Dr. Michael Keogh at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (2007 to 2010), New York, involved investigating the epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation using post-translational modifications on yeast histones. Her work helped understand the multiple ways in which lysine acetylations on histone variant H2A.Z are regulated under different conditions and in turn regulate the diverse functions of H2A.Z. She then moved to Dr. Scott Keeney’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, where she investigated the mechanism of repair of protein-linked DNA double-strand breaks using Saccharomyces cerevisiae Topoisomerase II as the model system.

With this scientific training in the fields of molecular biology, cell biology, genetics and biochemistry, she moved to her current position as the R&D scientist at the CCR-Sequencing Facility in 2015, where she has been working towards the development and validation of new technologies and applications for Next-Generation Sequencing.