Bluma Lesch, MD, PhD

Bluma Lesch works on mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in the context of development, evolution, and disease, with a special interest in the genetics and epigenetics of the mammalian germ line. Her research integrates information across a wide range of biological scales, from molecular mechanism to organismal development to species evolution, using both experimental and computational approaches. Current projects focus on (1) uncovering the rules and mechanisms of gene regulatory evolution, (2) defining transgenerational epigenetic contributions to offspring phenotype, and (3) using the unique regulatory biology of the germ line to discover fundamental gene regulatory mechanisms that go awry in disease.

Dr. Lesch earned her B.S. from Yale University in 2003. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 from Rockefeller University and her M.D. in 2011 from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA, from 2011-2017, where she was awarded an NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellowship and also named a Hope Funds for Cancer Research postdoctoral fellow. She received a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists in 2015, and returned to New Haven to join the Yale faculty in 2017. She was names a Searle Scholar in 2019 and a Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2021.