My research focuses on environmental effects on gene regulation and gene expression to identify molecular and cellular mechanisms that trigger development of autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD) and type 1 diabetes (T1D). In this context, the main focus of my research is to understand the mechanistic post-transcriptional and -translational changes induced by environmental cues (e.g., medications, chemicals, cytokines) that promote AITD and T1D development. By assessing multiple aspects of gene regulation (including chromatin states, transcription factor binding footprints, profiles of different epigenetic markers and posttranscriptional modifications) my research correlates environmental stimuli with variation in mRNA and protein expression to find causal relationship between environment, genetic variation and gene expression.