Lilly Encarnation

Lilly is originally from Charlottesville, VA. She obtained her B.A. in Organismal Biology and Ecology from Colorado College where she researched the evolution of epigenetic silencing in divergent yeast species, as well as temporal patterns in urban bat activity during a semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. During the summer after graduation, she participated in a computational epidemiology internship at the UVA Biocomplexity Institute to build her coding skills.  For graduate studies, she wants to bring together her biological and computational experiences to research topics involving the evolution of complex biological systems. 

Research Area

Lilly is currently working in the lab of Rob Mitra, whose research is focused on understanding how transcription factors achieve their in vivo specificities and dissecting the gene regulatory networks that govern developmental and disease processes. Lilly is researching how transcription factors find their DNA targets in the genome, particularly seeking to understand whether there is bias in the search process and if so, how this information may be used to improve TF binding predictions. This research could favor a revision to the leading transcription factor search model (which posits that the search process is unbiased) and offer up the idea that biases in the local DNA context may be acting as kinetic funnels to transcription factors.