Neerja Vashist is a rotating Ph.D. student in the Genomics and Bioinformatics, IBS program at GWU. She is interested in understanding the effect of hormones on brain development using neural stem/progenitor cells and their differentiated daughter cells as an in vitro model.  Additionally, she wants to use the CRISPR/Cas9 system as a tool to manipulate mammalian stem cells to further understand the pathways involved in the hormonal organization of the brain. Vashist obtained her Bachelor’s degree from University of California Los Angeles in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics with a minor in Bioinformatics. As an undergraduate student, she focused on understanding the effect of testosterone on the transcriptome and epigenome of mouse neural stem cells.