Bryan Bjork, Ph.D.

My research program focuses on the etiology that underlies onset of human and mouse craniofacial birth defects. One focus is the developmental and molecular characterization of cleft palate in loss of function mouse mutants for the paralogous transcription factors, Prdm16 and Mecom , in addition to several other novel clefting mutants. Another component of these studies is the morphometric analysis of these craniofacial mouse mutants via uCT scanning to detect mutation and strain dependent variation in craniofacial and cranial bones in collaboration with Dr. Erin Leslie (Dept. of Anatomy) and the study of inner and middle ear defects in collaboration with Dr. Michael Ebeid (Dept. of Anatomy). We aim to develop and utilize strategies for rapid analysis of loss-of-function phenotypes for positionally-cloned genes using RNAi, targeted conditional gene trap and CRISPR- Cas9.
Mouse models of human birth defects
Craniofacial development and disease
Gene discovery and technology development