Miguel Pereira

Postdoctoral Fellow

About me: I have been all over the place. I moved from Portugal to Greenbelt, MD when I was 7 years old. Then it was off to the University of Michigan as an undergrad from 1995-1999. I stayed in Ann Arbor working for a few years and eventually got my Biochemistry Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2009. After a brief stint as a professional poker player, I headed back to the east coast where I worked at New York University as a professor in a full time teaching capacity from 2010 until August of 2016. I was then fortunate enough to have the opportunity to join the Heemstra lab as a post-doctoral fellow. My hobbies are poker (obviously), hiking (a new one now that I live in Utah), and weekend days where I sleep in and have nothing planned once I eventually wake up.

Research: I am working on discovering ways to use fluorescence to track a target RNA inside living mammalians cells. To accomplish this I am using evolutionary strategies in the laboratory that reveal RNA sequences that covalently link a fluorophore to a target RNA inside a functional mammalian cell. 

Email: pereiram426(at)gmail(dot)com