Nadya Dimitrova

Nadya Dimitrova, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology on Term at Yale University. Originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, she graduated with an Sc.B. in Biochemistry from Brown University in 2002. Dimitrova joined the graduate program at the Rockefeller University, earning her Ph.D. in 2009 for her work on the signaling and repair of dysfunctional telomeres. She was awarded the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award for her graduate work. As a postdoctoral fellow, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Tyler Jacks at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where she developed genetic mouse models to study noncoding RNAs in cancer biology. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Yale University and a member of the Yale Center for RNA Science and Medicine and the Yale Cancer Center. Her research focuses on understanding the functions and mechanisms of long noncoding RNAs in cancer. She teaches advanced undergraduate seminar courses on Epigenetics and The Human Genome at Yale College.

Nadya Dimitrova's research focuses on lncRNAs, transcriptional regulation, and cancer. Her work explores the role of long non-coding RNAs in transcriptional control and their implications in disease. Key studies include the function of lincRNA-p21 in promoting Polycomb target gene expression and enforcing the G1/S checkpoint, as well as the role of lncRNAs in cancer progression and therapeutic resistance. Dimitrova's research also examines how lncRNAs influence DNA repair mechanisms and cell cycle regulation, particularly through interactions with proteins like 53BP1 and MRN. Her findings highlight the significance of lncRNAs in cancer biology and their potential as therapeutic targets.