Her research focus is on hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) biology and the development of human synthetic leukemia models to identify therapeutic vulnerabilities in high fatality pediatric leukemia. Long-lived HSC sustain the constant production of all mature cell lineages in the blood system, and constitute the critical cellular component of transplantation procedures performed in oncology for high risk malignancies, including leukemia. Nonetheless, factors that dictate HSC fate remain poorly defined, and their isolation and ex vivo culture remain challenging, limiting their clinical applications. The main focus of the laboratory is to study the role of chromatin methylation in human HSC biology. Accessibility of the transcriptional machinery to the genetic code is mediated through the concerted actions of chromatin modifying enzymes. The Mll (Mixed Lineage Leukemia) gene, encoding for a histone methyltransferase (of lysine 4 on histone 3, or H3K4) is involved in normal HSC maintenance and mutated in >70% of infant leukemia cases. Once thought to be irreversible, histone methylation is now regarded as a highly dynamic process, since the identification of the histone demethylase LSD1 (KDM1A) in 2004.