Beatriz Mercado

Beatriz received her Associates in Science from Bronx Community College, where she majored in Biology. She then attended John Jay College and obtained a Bachelor of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology with a minor in Psychology.  Before joining Dartmouth's Molecular and Cellular Biology Ph.D. program, she was an NIH-PREP fellow at Brown University. Beatriz is an NSF GRFP fellow and was awarded the E.E. Just Liftoff Graduate Fellowship. In the Kasper lab, Beatriz studies how hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) arise from a transient specialized subset of endothelial cells called hemogenic endothelial cells (hemECs) via an endothelial-to-hematopoietic transition (EHT) during early embryogenesis. She is broadly interested in how environmental cues and intrinsic mechanisms govern cell fate/plasticity of HSCPs and vascular development. To study EHT, she uses zebrafish as an animal model to study how zebrafish ADAM10a, a metalloproteinase type-1 transmembrane glycoprotein, regulates EHT. Beatriz enjoys reading fantasy novels and playing video games.