Mitzi Kuroda

Mitzi Kuroda was born in 1958 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she attended elementary and junior high schools. She spent a year in Tokyo before returning to attend Fayetteville High School where she graduated as valedictorian in 1977. Mitzi Kuroda said, "When I learned about recombinant DNA in college, it captured my imagination. I had to toss aside all my plans to 'save the world' because the ability to make specific DNA molecules for molecular genetic experiments was just too enticing." == Academic research career ==

After postdoctoral work at Stanford, Kuroda became a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine. She has developed an important technique in which epigenetic regulators and their targets are cross-linked, then analyzed via mass spectrometry. In 2017, her laboratory discovered a master regulatory complex for Drosophila development. Recently, she has begun studies of regulation in cancer cells. Kuroda's laboratory has shown that BRD4-NUT regulator leads to cancer via causing histone modification changes that produce a cascade of remodeling in which domains are opened to allow inappropriate expression of genes by transcription of their RNA. == Honors and awards ==

• 1992 Searle Scholar https://www.searlescholars.net/person/253 • 2013 National Academy of Sciences • National Academy of Arts and Sciences == Personal life ==

Kuroda is married to geneticist Stephen Elledge, and they have two grown children. == Selected works ==