Shaimaa Ahmed, Ph.D.

About Me

I have obtained my undergraduate degree from McMaster University in Pharmacology where I also completed a one year co-operative education work term at AstraZeneca in Montreal.

In 2007, I joined the Matthews lab to complete my Ph.D. My work focused on understanding the mechanism of crosstalk between the aryl hydrocarbon receptor and estrogen receptor alpha in human immortalized breast cancer cells on a genome wide scale. I have used techniques such as chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) coupled with DNA microarrays (ChIP-chip), ChIP-seq, RT-PCR, Western blots, reporter gene assays, siRNA, FACS, and various molecular biology techniques to dissect the mechanism of crosstalk between these two transcription factors.

After graduating in 2012, I have stayed on in the lab and continue to explore the role of each receptor system in breast cancer using gene targeting approaches, such as zinc finger nucleases and CRISPR methodologies. I am also heavily involved in investigating the role of TiPARP (TCDD-inducible PARP; ARTD14), an AHR target gene, in TCDD-mediated toxicity using animal models.

View Dr. Ahmed's thesis