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Dr. Elaine Ritter is a postdoctoral research associate at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences at Florida State University and conducted her honors thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. David Gilbert. Her work focused on the influence of DNA replication timing in neural specification of embryonic stem cells. Dr. Ritter completed her PhD in Cell & Molecular Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University under the mentorship of Dr. Michelle Southard-Smith. In her thesis work, she discovered that serotonin signaling via the 5-HT3 receptor is required for the development of autonomic and sensory innervation of the bladder in mice. Dr. Ritter then worked with Dr. Donna Martin at the University of Michigan in the Department of Pediatrics, where she studied the chromatin remodeler CHD7 and its function in sensory nervous system development. She is currently studying genetic and epigenetic drivers of neuroblastoma, a pediatric malignancy derived from the neural crest. Dr. Ritter is an expert in developmental neurobiology, neural crest development, sensory neuroscience, and mouse genetics.