Instructor in Ophthalmology

Dr. Rosario Fernandez Godino received her BS from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in Spain. Chari worked at the Spanish National Center for Cancer Research and the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research before obtaining her PhD in Genetics and Cellular Biology from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2009.
Dr. Fernandez Godino studied putative mutations in rare diseases by Next Generation Sequencing Platforms as a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical Genome Project in Seville, Spain.
In November 2011, she joined the Ocular Genomics Institute, where she continues her research by studying the role of Complement System in age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Contact Information:
Phone: 617-573-6787

Senior Research Technologist

Dr. Parthena Foltopoulou received her B.S. in Chemistry and her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. Parthena did her postdoctoral training in cancer biology in the Molecular Oncology Research Institute in Tufts Medical Center (Boston, MA) where she studied the role of cell cycle signaling pathways that control physiological mammary development, differentiation and oncogenesis using both in vitroand in vivomethodologies. Additionally, she developed comparative oncology approaches utilizing spontaneous canine tumors and cell lines from different species to study epigenetic dysregulation in normal and diseased states of urothelium, mast cell and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, towards discovery of potential therapeutics benefiting canine patients and readily translatable to human patients. Parthena joined the Fernandez-Godino lab as a Senior Research Technologist in September 2018

Research Fellow

Blanca Chinchilla Rodriguez graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain with a B.S. in Veterinary Medicine. After that, she was heavily involved in animal immunology and virology at different laboratories and she finally developed her doctoral thesis at Genomics and Fish Vaccination laboratory at the National Institute for Agrarian and Food Research and Technology (INIA) in Spain, where she studied the role of the non-virion protein of piscine novirhabdovirus (VHSV) in the immune transcriptome of trout.

During her PhD, she also stayed and collaborated with other groups such as the Fish Molecular Virology team at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in France, where she learned about reverse genetics systems. In December 2018, she joined the Ocular Genomics Institute and started her postdoctoral training in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) at the Fernandez-Godino lab.

Research Fellow

Dr. Heran Getachew received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences with an emphasis in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Florida in September 2019. Her dissertation work focused on the intracellular survival mechanisms of an oral bacterium, Porphyromonas gingivalis, within cardiovascular cells in the context of atherosclerosis. She joined the Ocular Genomics Institute in November 2019 to study extracellular vesicles as a biomarker for retinal degenerations.