With the rising prevalence of diabetes, understanding key internal and environmental factors that contribute to this prevalence is crucial for treating those diagnosed. Decades of genomic analyses have uncovered potential genetic variants associated with diabetes, but may of the their roles in biological processes remains a mystery. My current projects involve validating protein folding reporters to detect ER stress in model beta-islet pancreatic cells. We can then observe how specific genomic/proteomic perturbations affect the phenotypes of these model cells in type II diabetic conditions. I hope you couple my benchwork with computational pipelines to apply findings ‘in vivo’, eventually developing computational and therapeutic tools for clinical use.