Graduate Student, Eberhart Lab

Alfire's interest in science developed during her undergraduate career, where she worked in the Sewanee Herbarium and Landscape Analysis Lab under the guidance of Dr. Jon Evans at the University of the South (Sewanee) in Sewanee, TN. Her main contributions were in the development of the Domain Flora Project. Since the Domain Flora Project was launched in 1995, the Sewanee Herbarium has worked to catalog all of the vascular plant species on the Domain (the university's 13,000-acre landholdings). Most of Alfire's undergraduate study was dedicated to assisting the herbarium staff in the preparation of the Vascular Flora of the Domain. After graduating with a B.S. in biology from Sewanee, Alfire worked as a lab technician in Dr. Daniel Promislow's lab at the University of Georgia. It was there that she gained a greater interest in genetics, studying the effects of aging on biological networks in fruit flies. In 2012, she entered the cell and molecular ICMB graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. Alfire had a particular interest in research with implications on human disease; and it was this interest that led her to the Eberhart lab. The Eberhart lab studies the genetic mechanisms underlying craniofacial defects in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). With the Eberhart lab, Alfire will be examine 1) the interaction between ethanol and members of the planar cell polarity (PCP) pathway and 2) whether ethanol-sensitive miRNAs modulate at least part of this pathway.