User:Elianna L. Peak

About Elianna (Goldstein) Peak
Elianna was a science teacher at Maryknoll High School in Honolulu, HI for the 2009-2010 school year. She taught 9th grade conceptual physics, as well as 10th/11th grade Chemistry B/ Biology A.

Previous Research
2008-2009 Elianna was a graduate student in the Tian lab working on a project in nutrition in melon, focusing on metabolites from the carotenoid pathway produced in melon fruit. Interest was in the difference in carotenoid metabolism between Cantaloup and Honeydew.

2006-2008 Elianna has her PhD candidacy in plant biology with a designated emphasis in biotechnology (granted in 2008). Elianna was a graduate student in the Comai Labworking on a project on the trait of survival of aneuploid offspring, in the model system, Arabidopsis thaliana. She also looked at ploidy of various Camellina species in collaboration with an evolutionary study being done by Targeted Growth, Inc.

2005-2006 Elianna was a lab technician for the COGA project in the Goate Lab at the Washington University School of Medicine, department of Psychiatry, working on marker association studies with Alcoholism in a family based(not case-control) study.

2005 She has an AB in archaeology and biology from Washington University in St Louis. She did her senior capstone project in Dr. Gayle Fritz's Lab. The research was a paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from Cole's Creek period strata at the Raffman site in Madison Parish, Louisiana.

Publications
Hutcheon et al., Polyploid genome of Camelina sativa revealed by isolation of fatty acid synthesis genes. BMC Plant Biol. 2010 Oct 27;10:233. link

Wang et al., Genetic variation in the CHRNA5 gene affects mRNA levels and is associated with risk for alcohol dependence. Mol Psychiatry. 2009 May;14(5):501-10. Epub 2008 Apr 15. link

Dick et al., Family-based association analyses of alcohol dependence phenotypes across DRD2 and neighboring gene ANKK1. Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 2007 Oct;31(10):1645-53. link

Outside Interests
Elianna loves the outdoors, from a day in the park to snorkeling, and from distance running to backpacking.

She was a member of the UC Davis women's ultimate team, the Pleiades from 2006-2008.

She enjoys taking things apart and putting them back together, and making jewelry.