Kerry Geiler-Samerotte

Kerry is an Assistant Professor in the Biodesign Institute, in the Mechanisms of Evolution Research Center. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov Lab (2014 - 2018) her research aimed to elucidate mechanisms that regulate the amount of phenotypic variation within clonal populations as well as across genotypes. Such mechanisms are not well understood, yet have important consequences. For example, the breakdown of mechanisms that buffer phenotypic variation may allow adaptation to novel environments, as well as contribute to complex genetic disease. Together with a graduate student in the lab, Grant Kinsler, Kerry developed an approach to build genotype-phenotype-fitness maps of adaptation using the fitness data across multiple similar environments and co-discovered the notion of fitness-relevant modularity of adaptation. Kerry became interested in protein-folding chaperones as possible regulators of phenotypic variation while quantifying the fitness cost of protein misfolding during her graduate work at Harvard University in the laboratories of Dan Hartl and Allan Drummond. Her recent research as a postdoctoral fellow in Mark Siegal's lab at New York University focuses on a particular protein-folding chaperone, HSP90. This work demonstrates that HSP90 suppresses non-genetic phenotypic heterogeneity, but interacts epistatically with genetic perturbations (rather than strictly as a suppressor).