Crystal Rogers
Assistant Professor

Brief Biography

Originally from the wine country in Northern California, I moved to Southern California in 1997 to attend UCLA. I received my B.S. in biology from UCLA in December of 2001. After I graduated I worked with J. Patrick Johnson at Cedars Sinai for a year and a half and then took a big leap and moved across the U.S. to attend graduate school at Georgetown University. I began graduate school in August of 2003 and quickly joined the lab of Elena Casey in the Department of Biology. I was in the Casey lab for five and a half years studying early neural development in the African claw-toed frog, Xenopus laevis. I received by PhD from Georgetown in 2009 and moved to the California Institute of Technology in January of 2010 where I was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Marianne Bronner in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering. Currently, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at CSUN.

My lab studies the molecular mechanisms that drive neural crest cell development in chicken (Gallus gallus) and axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) embryos. More specifically, I am interested in identifying and characterizing genes and proteins involved in the specification of these tissues as well as those controlling the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT), a process that occurs naturally during development and also during cancer transformation.

Research 

This person has not added any Research Interests.

Connections