Inventor Profiles

Research area The Gasch Lab works with budding yeast, a model organism used to study and understand fundamental principles of how cells work. Projects include understanding how cells respond to stressful conditions and fundamental principles of stress biology, which is related to aging and disease. The lab also uses that knowledge to engineer yeast for better industrial uses, with WARF’s support. The Gasch Lab is part of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, applying basic knowledge to applied projects.

• Lab website
• Faculty page
• Patents, publications and more

What excites you about your work? 

“I love thinking about the dynamic puzzle that is a living, breathing organism–it’s super gratifying to contribute to knowledge of cells and human aging. I love doing collaborative science, getting to work with students and postdocs, and the camaraderie of shared deep thinking. It’s exhilarating. One project I’m really excited about is our discovery that aneuploid cells (that carry too many chromosomes) have a premature aging phenotype, which is also seen in people with Down syndrome. We have a new collaboration with Anita Bhattacharyya at the Waisman Center to test our hypothesis in cells from people with Down syndrome.”

What do you hope to achieve? 

“We hope to have an impact–our applied projects may generate knowledge or a product that industry could use. We also hope to contribute to greater knowledge in our field. Most scientific problems take a long time to solve, so having an impact on the field is really exciting, and years later, when you can see that your work was used as the foundation for some other invention or innovation, that’s amazing.”

Audrey studies a relatively simple model organism, but the resulting research projects and innovations can be applied to commercial needs in vastly broad areas of biology. She looks for the applications in the fundamental discoveries.

– Jennifer Gottwald, WARF, Director of Licensing