What’s all the talk about Sirtuins?

“Genotyping mice, collecting tumors, weighing tumors, it’s a lot of what I do,” says Irma Fernandez—a third-year graduate student in Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology at Cornell whose work is featured in this Cornell Research story. “I work on one of the more unusual projects in my lab." 

Mirroring the uniqueness of her project, Fernandez’s status as a graduate student is also distinctive. She is a joint student in the labs of Robert S. Weiss, Biomedical Sciences, and Hening Lin, Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Whereas most people work with one major principal investigator (PI) on their research, Fernandez works with two, the product of a long-standing collaboration with Weiss, Lin, and Richard A. Cerione, Molecular Medicine/Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Having dual PIs allows Fernandez to combine the biochemistry focus of the Lin lab with the molecular biology and genetics focus of the Weiss lab—her key areas of interest.

Read more about her work in the Cornell Research story.