One of the newest faculty in Penn’s Department of Bioengineering has hit the ground running — so much that her lab’s work is getting noticed by some of the discipline’s most prestigious journals.
Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, PhD, who joined the BE faculty in 2014, was recently one of three scientists featured in a Q&A in Cell Stem Cell dedicated to how labs bring their first published papers to fruition. Along with Professors Rong Lu of USC and Alvaro Rada-Iglesias of the University of Cologne (Germany), Professor Phillips-Cremins discussed how the compactness of Penn’s campus and the interdisciplinary nature of her research contributed to the publication of her lab’s first paper last May.
The lead author on the paper, Jonathan Beagan, is a PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering. “This paper was my first research project as a graduate student, so for me it was an amazing opportunity to lead an exciting project while gaining intense real time training in how to be a diligent researcher in the field of 3D epigenomics,” Jon says.
“I worked very closely with Thomas Gilgenast, Jesi Kim, Zach Plona (the co-second authors on the paper) under Dr. Cremins’s leadership – in retrospect it was a unique and extremely effective team structure, and I’m thankful that I got to learn from all of them over the course of the project.”
