Quick Facts
Biography
Angela Brooks is an Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a member of the Genomics Institute.
Early life and education
Brooks watched Gattaca in 1997 and was inspired to study genetics. Brooks studied biology at the University of California, San Diego, where she specialised in bioinformatics. She became interested in alternative splicing, and decided to focus on this for her doctoral studies. She moved to University of California, Berkeley for her graduate program, working with Steven E. Brenner. During her doctorate she worked on Modencode, a project which looked to create an encyclopaedia of the elements in the Drosophila melanogaster genomes. She created JuncBASE (junction-based analysis of splicing events), a program which analysed high-throughput sequencing data generated. Brooks was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, where she worked with Matthew Meyerson. Here she studied the cancerous effects of mutation in U2 small nuclear RNA auxiliary factor 1 (U2AF1) and SF3B1. U2AF1 is mutated in adenocarcinoma of the lung and myeloid leukemia, and SF3B1 in lymphoid leukemia.
Research and career
Brooks set up an alternative splicing lab at University of California, Santa Cruz in 2015. She uses nanopore sequencing for full length RNA sequencing.
Awards and honours
Her awards and honours include;
- 2017 The Scientist One to Watch
- 2018 University of California, Santa Cruz Women in Science and Engineering Award
- 2018 Pew Scholar
- 2019 Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program Award
