简介

Dr. Bhaskara’s research goal is to understand the functions for histone deacetylases (HDACs) in genome maintenance, with the ultimate objective of using the knowledge to improve the therapeutic benefits of HDAC inhibition as a treatment for cancer. In Dr. Bhaskara’s post-doctoral research, she made the discovery that HDAC inhibitors induce cancer cell death by directly targeting genome stability independent of their effect of on transcription. She showed HDAC inhibitors trigger genotoxic stress and death only in cycling cells, and thereby, providing a mechanistic explanation for how HDAC inhibitors selectively kill rapidly cycling cancer cells and not the quiescent normal cells. Using genetic deletion systems, she further found novel functions for Hdac3 in DNA repair, DNA replication and chromatin structure maintenance. Collectively, these findings provide a new paradigm for the mode-of-action of HDAC inhibitors, which are FDA-approved drugs for the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphomas. As an independent investigator, Dr. Bhaskara’s lab goal is to investigate cellular functions of Hdacs in maintaining genome stability. Dr. Bhaskara did her PhD in Dr. Ranjan Ganguly’s lab in University of Tennessee, Knoxville and performed her post-doctoral training at Vanderbilt University, Nashville in Dr. Scott Hiebert’s lab. Dr. Bhaskara received Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center post-doc of the year 2010 award and NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research service F32 grant award during her post-doc study.