KATHRIN PLATH, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry

Kathrin Plath is an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry and a member of the UCLA Stem Cell Institute since 2006. She received her PhD in 1999 at Humboldt University to Berlin in Germany for studies in cell biology.

As a PhD student with Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School, she discovered how the signal sequence of a secretory protein is recognized by the translocation channel in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Barbara Panning at the University of California, San Francisco, Kathrin started her studies on X-inactivation, one of the most dramatic examples of epigenetic regulation of gene expression. She then begun to define the function of chromatin regulators in embryonic stem cell in the laboratory of Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge. Her research showed that a special class of epigenetic regulators prevents the expression of transcription factors in embryonic stem cells, which, if expressed, would cause differentiation of these cells. At UCLA, Kathrin will focus on understanding the epigenetic information underlying pluripotency, self-renewal, and reprogramming.

Read more about Kathrin Plath:

• Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center
• David Geffen School of Medicine Biography