Undergraduate Researcher

Mia is a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Major from Sunbury, Pennsylvania. She loves cooking and trying new foods. She also enjoys traveling, painting, and coffee.

Her research focuses on the roles different genes play in purine metabolism and how deficiencies of these enzymes can result in inborn errors of purine metabolism. Specifically, she is interested in understanding what phenotypic changes may occur with the loss of hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase function, an enzyme encoded by the gene hprt-1 in C. elegans. Her experiments aim to use C. elegans as a model system for these inborn errors of purine metabolism.