Jaeden Flury

Jaeden Flury is originally from San Diego, California. She obtained her B.S. in biology at California State University, San Marcos, where she also spent two years as an undergraduate researcher in a molecular microbiology lab. Jaeden has a strong passion for improving children’s health, and therefore, plans to pursue a biomedical PhD studying the genetic and genomic basis of pediatric disease.

Research Area

Jaeden is currently working in the lab of Dustin Baldridge, whose research focuses on developing high-throughput cell-based assays for the functional classification of clinically observed genetic variants. Their goal is to combat the overwhelming occurrence of variants of uncertain significance (VUS), as they cause major limitations in clinical diagnostic settings due to the inability to determine if these variants are truly disease-causing or not. Jaeden has been using a functional genomics approach to classify genetic variants within genes of the Sonic Hedgehog pathway that are associated with rare Mendelian disorders in pediatric patients. She is currently conducting a high-throughput Sort-Seq experiment to examine the functional effects of hundreds of GLI2 variants in parallel via deep mutational scanning. With these efforts, Jaeden aims to overcome the VUS problem by implementing an accurate and reliable method for reclassifying VUS by directly measuring the effects of these variants in the lab.