Dorothy Tsai

Graduate Student (Ph.D)

Biomedical Sciences

 

 

Summary

Dorothy Tsai is a PhD student in the Biomedical Sciences graduate program at UC San Diego. She also graduated from UCSD with a B.S. in Molecular and Cell Biology, during which she studied the epithelial-mesenchymal transition in triple-negative breast cancer with Dr. William Kim. Following graduation, she joined Dr. Trey Ideker’s lab at UCSD and researched synaptic mRNA localization and composition in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders. Currently, Dorothy is jointly mentored by Dr. Frank Furnari and Dr. Gene Yeo as she uncovers the role of RNA modifications and their downstream pathways in glioblastoma.

Outside the lab, she enjoys crocheting, crosswords, and reading literary fiction (essentially any grandma hobby).

 

Education

B.S., Molecular and Cell Biology, UC San Diego 2022

 

Publications

  • Schaffer L. V., Hu M., Qian G., Moon K. M., Pal A., Soni N., Latham A. P., Pontano Vaites L., Tsai D., Mattson N. M., Licon K., Bachelder R., Cesnik A., Gaur I., Le T., Leineweber W., Palar A., Pulido E., Qin Y., Zhao X., Churas C., Lenkiewicz J., Chen J., Ono K., Pratt D., Zage P., Echeverria I., Sali A., Harper J. W., Gygi S. P., Foster L. J., Huttlin E. L., Lundberg E., Ideker T. Multimodal cell maps as a foundation for structural and functional genomics. Nature. 2025 Apr 9. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-08878-3.

  • Mei Y., Gosztyla M. L,. Tan X., Dozier L. E., Wilkinson B., McKetney J., Lee J., Chen M., Tsai D., Kopalle H., Gritsenko M. A., Hartel N., Graham N. A., Flores I., Gilmore-Hall S. K., Xu S., Marquez C. A., Liu S. N., Fong D., Chen J., Licon K., Hong D., Wright S. N., Kreisberg J. F., Nott A., Smith R. D., Qian W. J., Swaney D. L., Iakoucheva L. M., Krogan N. J., Patrick G. N., Zhou Y., Feng G., Coba M. P., Yeo G. W., Ideker T. Integrated multi-omic characterizations of the synapse reveal RNA processing factors and ubiquitin ligases associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. Cell Syst. 2025 Mar 3:101204. doi: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101204.