Current Positions

• Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Graduate Program Affiliations

• Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology)
• Biochemistry
• Biomedical Science (Cell and Developmental Biology)
• Genetics
• Biomedical Science (Molecular Medicine)
• Neuroscience
• Translational Biomedicine
• Medical Scientist Training Program+

Research areas

• Eukaryotic Gene Expression
• Molecular and Biochemical Genetics

Geyer's laboratory focuses on understanding how nuclear organization impacts transcriptional regulation. To gain insights into these processes, Geyer's lab has two research focus areas. First, they study cell type specific transcription, which is achieved through the integration of regulatory inputs from multiple classes of cis-regulatory elements, such as enhancers, silencers, and insulators. Their studies focus on insulators, which are the class of cis-regulatory elements that establish transcriptional fidelity through the formation of topological domains, preventing enhancers and silencers from interacting with non-target promoters. Defects in insulator function have been identified in cancers, imprinting syndromes, and repeat expansion diseases, highlighting the importance of insulator function in transcriptional regulation. Their data suggest that insulators are closely related to other transcriptional regulatory elements, emphasizing that transcriptional regulation depends upon genomic context. Second, Geyer's lab studies the family of LEM-domain proteins, components of an extensive protein network that assembles beneath the inner nuclear envelope. LEM-domain proteins are lamin-interacting proteins that anchor chromatin to the nuclear periphery. Loss of LEM domain proteins causes a spectrum of tissue-specific human diseases, including muscular dystrophy, cardiomyopathy, and bone density disorders. They are studying the family of Drosophila nuclear envelope LEM-domain proteins to address how tissue-specific defects result from alterations in globally expressed proteins.