Anne West is a professor of neurobiology at the Duke University School of Medicine and the associate director for the Duke Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). She is a molecular geneticist and neurobiologist who studies how transcriptional regulation orchestrates brain development and activity-dependent neuronal plasticity.

The West lab incorporates high-throughput sequencing approaches to identify the chromatin mechanisms of gene transcription in neurons and uses in vivo mouse models as well as human iPSC-derived neurons to study the functional consequences of chromatin regulation for neural circuit establishment and plasticity. Her lab has made substantial contributions to understanding the role of the methyl-DNA binding protein MeCP2 and regional populations of GABAergic interneurons in brain plasticity processes induced by psychostimulants and antidepressants.

West and colleagues use the mouse cerebellum as a model to discover how chromatin plasticity underlies the timing of postmitotic phases of neuronal maturation. They are pioneering the use of CRISPR/dCas9-mediated epigenome editing techniques to test the functions of gene regulatory elements in the temporal and spatial regulation of gene transcription. The focus of the lab’s current work is to discover how autism-associated genes establish chromatin architectures in developing neurons that support maturation of neuronal gene expression programs.