- Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Montserrat Anguera is Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. She trained as a molecular biologist and built her career studying epigenetic regulation and long noncoding RNAs in mammalian development and disease.
The Anguera laboratory was the first to discover that female lymphocytes incompletely maintain X-chromosome inactivation, leading to dysregulated expression of immune-related X-linked genes such as TLR7, CD40LG, and CXCR3. Her group’s foundational work — published in PNAS, JEM, and Cell Reports — defines a molecular mechanism that helps explain the striking female bias of lupus, scleroderma, and other systemic autoimmune diseases, and her lab continues to investigate how Xist RNA dynamics and NF-κB signaling regulate this process.
Dr. Anguera is a member of the Penn Colton Center for Autoimmunity, the Penn Epigenetics Institute, the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where her work anchors Penn’s leadership in sex-biased autoimmune disease biology. She is widely recognized as a pioneer in the epigenetics of immune sex differences.