Dr. Jurgens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she studies the genetic basis of disorders of brain development in the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Engle.
Dr. Jurgens obtained her undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010, where she researched mechanisms of learning and memory formation in songbirds in the laboratory of Dr. David Clayton. She then studied mechanisms of blood pressure regulation in the laboratory of Dr. Pedro Jose at Children’s National Medical Center (Washington, DC) and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD.
In 2017, she obtained her PhD in Human Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD) under the guidance of Dr. David Valle. There she identified novel candidate genes for rare inherited disorders through the Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics and performed mechanistic studies of a disorder of the skeleton and the retina.
In her current postdoctoral research, Dr. Jurgens couples DNA sequences of research participants with functional modeling in zebrafish to find novel causes of pediatric disorders of eye and facial movement.
