Research Scholar

Dr. Anamaria Zavala joined the Mechanical Adaptations Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Boise State University in October 2020 as a Principal Research Scholar. Her research focuses on the effects of mechanical stimulation on stem cell repair of bulky DNA adducts, including UV-induced and chemotherapy-induced DNA adducts.

Dr. Zavala completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her postdoctoral training at Washington State University and University of Idaho. Dr. Zavala’s research has focused on understanding how native chromatin structure and disease affect the repair of bulky DNA adducts with the goal of improving cancer therapeutics and patient outcomes.

Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
Dissertation: “Phage Display of ScFv Peptides Specific for UV Induced (6-4) Dithymidine Photoproducts”
Advisor: Dr. John D. Groopman

B.S in Genetics– University of California, Berkeley

• Zavala AG, Groopman JD, Strickland PT, Chandrasegaran S. Phage display of ScFv peptides recognizing the thymidine(6-4)thymidine photoproduct. Nucleic Acids Research (2000) Apr 1; 28(7): E24.
• O’Dowd JM, Zavala AG, Brown CJ, Mori T, Fortunato EA. HCMV-infected cells maintain efficient nucleotide excision repair of the viral genome while abrogating repair of the host genome. PLoS Pathogens (2012) Nov; 8(11): e1003038.
• Zavala AG*, Morris RT, Wyrick JJ, Smerdon MJ. High-resolution characterization of CPD Hotspot Formation in Human Fibroblasts. Nucleic Acids Research (2014) Jan 1;42(2):893-905.
  *Corresponding author
• Zavala AG, Kulkarni A, Fortunato EA. A novel dual color Southern to assess repair in two genomes simultaneously. Journal of Virological Methods (2014) Jan 2;198C:64-68.
• Duan YL, Ye HQ, Zavala AG, Yang C-Q, Miao LF, Fu B-f, Seo K, Davrinche C, Luo, MH, and Fortunato EA. Maintenance of large numbers of virus genomes in human cytomegalovirus-infected T98G glioblastoma cells. Journal of Virology (2014) Apr;88(7):3861-73.
• Zavala AG, O’Dowd JM, Fortunato EA. Infection of a single cell line with distinct strains of human cytomegalovirus can result in large variations in virion production and facilitate efficient screening of virus protein function. Journal of Virology (2015) Dec 16;90(5):2523-35.

Postdoctoral Research Associate – Dr. Elizabeth A. Fortunato, University of Idaho, Department of Biological Sciences, Moscow, ID.

Research Topic: Repair of UV-induced DNA damage in human cytomegalovirus infected cells.

• Developed a dual color Southern to visualize DNA repair in both host and viral genomes in infected cells simultaneously.
• Identification of genes involved in HCMV genome trafficking to the nucleus.
• Transcriptome analysis and characterization of alterations in gene expression during differentiation of iPSCs to neural progenitor cells and conversion to HCMV susceptibility.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow – Dr. Michael J. Smerdon, Washington State University, Pullman, WA.

Research Topic: DNA repair in the context of chromatin.

• Developed a UV-induced DNA adduct specific immunoprecipitation protocol to map DNA adducts across the human genome using high resolution tiling arrays.
• Managed collaborative bioinformatics analysis of tiling array data to correlate histone modifications and nucleosome level changes associated with UV-induced DNA adducts.