Jasmine Plummer, PhD

Dr. Jasmine Plummer, PhD is an Associate Member of St. Jude Faculty and Director, Center for Spatial OMIC. She was formerly an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Associate Director of the Applied Genomics, Computational and Translational Core at Cedars Sinai. She graduated with honors, BSc from University of Toronto. Her MSc was completed in the laboratory of Roger Croll, PhD at Dalbousie University (Halifax, Canada) in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Physiology Under the mentorship of Dr. Joe Culotti, she received her PhD at the University of Toronto, Mount Sinai Hospital (Toronto, Canada). In her doctoral work, Dr Plummer used genome wide screens to identifying novel genes that regulate the nervous system development. In her post-doctoral work in the laboratory of Dr. Pat Levitt at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and University of Southern California, Dr. Plummer utilized system biology approaches to understanding the genetic risk of neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. As an Autism Speaks postdoctoral fellow, her research focused on the discovery and function of gene regulatory networks involving autism risk genes. Dr. Plummer is currently a principal investigator on several institutional and foundational grants in which her research is focused on understanding the mechanisms by which cancers, specifically ovarian, breast and prostate, share common genetic risk and how this translates to susceptibility and oncogenesis. Dr. Plummer’s lab uses a mult-iomic approach through genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic data to functionally interrogate ovarian cancer genetic risk. From this current work, Dr. Plummer tries to understand how early genetic events trigger cancer pathogenicity to find early biomarkers of ovarian cancer.