Welcome to the Sparks Lab @ UC Irvine Public Health within the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health
We are a developmental toxicology lab and our goal is to uncover links between environmental exposures and embryonic molecular alterations, as these changes can heighten the risk of developmental defects. More specifically, we focus on studying how environmental toxicants impact transcriptional regulators such as transcription factors and microRNAs. Which can result in changes to stem cell fate during osteogenesis, leading to perturbed bone development.
Our lab uses a combination of approaches from stem cell biology, toxicology, mouse models, molecular biology, microscopy, and next-generation sequencing.