and grew up in the capital Bogota. She majored in Biology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia
and after completion she moved to Zurich in 2015 to complete her Master studies. She worked in the Wagner lab under the supervision of Dr. Joshua Payne and Dr. Tugce Bilgin
where she performed a data-driven computational analysis to evaluate the effects of tandem repeat sequences on transcription factor regulation. Now during her PhD
she will integrate different omics data from precancerous lesions of the human large intestine
and develop methods to analyze this type in data in order to facilitate its analysis to the community. In her free time
Sija is a Singaporean and she completed her undergraduate studies at National University of Singapore.
She went on to pursue her Masters in Cancer Biology at University of Dundee (UK) under the supervision of Prof. Roland Wolf and Dr. Colin Henderson.
During her masters she studied the effect of taking a combination of prescription drugs or dietary constituents on the induction of drug metabolism enzymes and drug clearance from the body in humanized mouse models.
Due to her interest in translational cancer research she is currently doing her PhD project which looks to develop a noninvasive biomarker assay for early detection of colorectal cancer.
Colonoscopy the standard CRC screening test while being sensitive is also invasive expensive require much preparation and involves risk of complications.
Despite the availability of many noninvasive stool tests for the patients these tests are still not on par with colonoscopy concerning the sensitivity in detecting tumors.
Thus my overall goal is to design a novel stool test which would reliably detect the presence of a tumor in the colorectum and consequently reduce colorectal cancer incidence.
