Meg Iminitoff
PhD candidate - Professor Marnie Blewitt’s Laboratory at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI)
Meg completed her Masters in Biomedical Science at Auckland University in 2017 before moving to Melbourne to work in Professor Marnie Blewitt’s laboratory at WEHI. In August 2019 she started her PhD funded by an Australian government Research Training scholarship. This year she was awarded a Student Research Grant by the Genetics Society of Australia and a bursary for funded conference attendance at the 2020 Genomic Imprinting Conference. Meg’s project focusses on a gene called SMCHD1, which acts to silence disease critical genes in the PWS cluster. Importantly, SMCHD1 affects the normal but silent copy of PWS genes that are inherited from the mother. Meg is investigating whether removing SMCHD1 will lead to reactivation of these silent maternal genes and potentially lead to improvements in disease symptoms. Through her work she also hopes to gain insight into the molecular mechanisms behind PWS with a view to better understanding how to target the root cause of PWS.