Moonwalk Team

Kathrin Plath, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biological Chemistry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Born in Germany, she received her master’s degree in Biochemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin, examining MAP kinase signaling pathways. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School for her doctorate studies, where she examined how secretory proteins translocate through the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. Dr. Plath received fellowships from the Life Sciences Research Foundation and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation for her post-doctoral training in epigenetics and stem cell biology with Dr. Barbara Panning at the University of California San Francisco and Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. Dr. Plath joined the UCLA faculty in 2006. Her lab integrates cell biological, molecular, biochemical, and genomics approaches to study epigenetic mechanisms underlying pluripotency, differentiation and reprogramming, with a particular emphasis on how transcription factors reprogram cell fates; how long-noncoding RNAs modulate gene expression and chromatin states; and how the genome is folded in three dimensions to fulfill its functions.

Dr. Plath is on the editorial board of Cell, Cell Stem Cell, Elife, and various other journals. She also serves as Director of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, and has received NIH’s New Innovator Award.