Binta Jalloh, Ph.D.

Binta Jalloh started a second post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health (CRGGH) in April 2024 after completing a 2-year post-doc position at the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Receptor Biology and Gene Expression doing single molecule tracking to understand the biophysical behaviors of transcription factors important for regulating gene expression in live budding yeast. Her primary role in the CRGGH is to perform urinary exosome profiling on cardiometabolic disorders in humans. Dr. Jalloh will spearhead any downstream analysis following the processed and purified exosomes from urine samples to shed light into the key microRNAs that are associated with cardiometabolic traits, and the pathways mediated by these miRNAs in cardiometabolic disease pathophysiology.

Prior to coming to the NIH, Dr. Jalloh completed her PhD work at Emory University under the co-mentorship of Drs. Anita Corbett and Ken Moberg in the Genetics and Molecular Biology Program working on monogenic causes of intellectual disability using the fruit fly as a model organism. Prior to grad school, Binta attended Case Western Reserve University and completed a 2-year project characterizing the Plasmodium falciparum parasites in a Madagascar population. She received her BS in Biology in 2012 from Montclair State University and was a MARC-U-STAR Scholar at Montclair working as an undergraduate research student in the Biology Department under Dr. Quinn Vega studying signal transduction and gene expression using bacterial cells.

Prior to coming to the USA, Binta was a refugee in Senegal after escaping from the civil war in Sierra Leone with her mother. After escaping from Sierra Leone to neighboring Guinea, Binta and her mother were rescued by the Red Cross and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and brought to Senegal. From Senegal, they were brought to Paterson, New Jersey, where Binta attended elementary school and she and her mother learned English as a second language. It is truly a privilege and an honor to have the opportunity to be a research scientist at the CRGGH and National Human Genome Research Institute here at the NIH.