Faculty profile: Andrea Gomez

Dr. Andrea Gomez has always been a microbiologist at heart. As a young girl growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, she remembers, “I had an affinity for the unseen, for diving deep.” Her love of tiny things powered her through a PhD in developmental genetics at New York University, where she began studying one of the smallest computational units in the brain: synapses. At these junctions between neurons, cells rely on genetic instructions to coordinate a dizzying number of molecular signals to form our neural pathways. As an assistant professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, Gomez combines molecular genetics and functional neuroscience to investigate how RNA—molecules that read genetic protein-building instructions—guide dynamic brain development.