Astrid Engel, PhD

Dr. Engel's research focuses on the impact of mobile element activity on human health, in particular the human transposable elements (TEs), L1, and alu elements. Her main goal is to investigate the mechanism by which transposable elements contribute to disease and how environmental factors, such as heavy metal exposure, contribute to TE-mediated genomic instability and disease. Dr. Engel uses ex-vivo studies and the state-of-the-art whole-genome next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches to investigate the contribution of mobile elements to human diseases such as cancer.  Dr. Engel is the course director of the graduate courses human molecular genetics and molecular epidemiology and the undergraduate course public health genomics. In addition, Dr. Engel serves on several editorial boards and is the editor-in-chief of Genetics.