Alexa Gormick

Alexa was born and raised in California where she became fascinated with developmental genetics and functional genomics because of her little brother’s FOXG1 syndrome diagnosis. She went on to pursue an education focused on these interests at the University of Utah, where she is a senior pursuing her HBS in biology with an emphasis in genetics and genomics and a minor in chemistry. After graduation, she plans to eventually pursue her PhD in genetics, developmental biology, molecular biology, or pharmacogenomics… In short, it’s hard for her to choose just one subject of focus, but for now, she looks forward to a postgraduate education and continued research in biology.

When she isn’t on campus or in the lab, Alexa loves to do everything ‘Utah’, including snowboarding, hiking, and archery.

Research:

Alexa has been a part of a slew of projects while a part of the English Lab, including investigating the precision in profiling a range of mutations for the creation of a high throughput sequencing pipeline and determining the basal activity of synthetic mammalian promoters as a part of generating a massively parallel reporter assay library. As a part of her honors thesis, she is performing a deep mutational scan of tetOs to characterize mutants with altered binding affinities to the TetR protein with the ultimate goal of constructing a synthetic regulatory program coined “repressilator”.