Rachael Philips, Ph.D., graduated in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in physiological science from UCLA. There, she volunteered and later transitioned to a lab assistant in Dr. Ram Raj Singh’s lab studying systemic lupus erythematosus skin pathogenesis. Next, Dr. Philips began graduate school to explore fundamental epigenetic questions in the immune system. Under the guidance of Dr. Virginia Shapiro at Mayo Clinic, she studied how histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3) regulates transcriptional programs during T cell development. Dr. Philips found that HDAC3 ensures appropriate thymocyte fate decisions by repressing transcription factors and cell surface receptors at multiple developmental checkpoints. Appreciating the importance of external stimuli leading to proper cell fate choices, she shifted to the peripheral immune system to understand how perturbations in cell signaling lead to downstream and sometimes long-term effects in the immune response. Accordingly, she joined Dr. John O’Shea’s research group in 2019 to understand the integration between cell signaling and immune response. In 2020, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Associate Training (PRAT) fellowship (F32 equivalent) to study the consequences of a STAT1 gain-of-function mutation in gene expression and immune response to viral infection.