Director

Dr. Paula Cohen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Genetics, Director of the Cornell Center for Reproductive Genomics, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.
Dr. Cohen has worked in the field of reproductive biology since 1989 and has a great deal of research experience in all aspects of reproduction and fertility. She obtained her PhD in reproductive physiology in 1992 at the University of London, England, where she studied the endocrine regulation of implantation with Dr. Stuart Milligan. She then moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, to work with Dr. Jeffrey Pollard. From 1993 until 1998, as a postdoctoral fellow in the Pollard lab she focused on the role of the mononuclear phagocyte growth factor, Colony Stimulating Factor-1 (CSF1) in gonadal function in males and females, and also the role of CSF1 in maturation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. During this time, as part of a collaboration with another laboratory at Einstein, she became involved with studies of DNA repair proteins in mammalian meiosis, and this became her major focus of study as a semi-independent investigator within the Pollard lab from 1998 until 2000. She joined the faculty of the department of genetics at Albert Einstein College in 2000, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women's Health, maintaining her focus on mammalian meiosis and gametogenesis, and then in 2004 was recruited to her current position within Cornell University. Since starting her own lab in 2000, Dr. Cohen has received funding from NIH, the March of Dimes, the National Down Syndrome Society, and from the Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics. She has co-authored 30 papers, served on several NIH Study Sections, and reviewed for a number of international grant bodies, including EMBO, the Wellcome Foundation, and the Royal Society of London.