Carolyn Phillips
Associate Editor, Gene Expression
Carolyn Phillips is an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California studying RNA silencing and gene regulation in C. elegans. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, working on the mechanisms of meiotic pairing and synapsis with Abby Dernburg. During her postdoc with Gary Ruvkun at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, she discovered a compartmentalized hub for small RNA biogenesis in C. elegans germ cells. This work led to her overarching interest in understanding how RNA silencing pathways are spatially organized. She further seeks to discover factors that modulate RNA silencing and contribute to the specificity of pathway. The Phillips lab tackles these questions using a combination of cell biology, microscopy, molecular genetics and genomics. Carolyn has been a March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Scholar (2017-2019) and a Pew Scholar (2017-2020).