Adelaide Tovar, Ph.D., was awarded an NIH Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) K99/R00, a specialized career transition program intended for postdocs who are from underrepresented backgrounds and/or have demonstrated a commitment to increasing inclusivity and equity in the scientific workforce. With this award, Tovar is launching her tenure track career. Her current postdoctoral position will be funded for two more years and she will then transition to a tenure track Assistant Professor position with funding for another three years.

Since 2021, Tovar has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Parker (Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Human Genetics and Bioinformatics) and Kitzman (Human Genetics and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics) labs where she studies how genetic variants and environmental factors can interact and cause disease. She uses data from large-scale genetic studies to identify genetic variation that is involved in disease processes and employs high-throughput technologies to characterize these variants, with a focus on type 2 diabetes. For this award, she is particularly interested in looking at monogenic forms of diabetes that arise due to a single severe mutation in only one gene. These genes are also involved in forms of diabetes that occur later in life. 

Tovar’s research on these rare diseases (less than 1-5% of the millions of diabetic patients in the world present these mutations) will help advance the foundational understanding of gene networks that cause diabetes across the lifespan and how interactions with environmental exposures such as diet and lifestyle contribute to disease susceptibility. She plans to apply these insights to other rare and common disease pairs in her future independent career. “By answering how one single mutation can cause this devastating disease, we hope to bring insight from rare disease biology into more common forms of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, and some cardiovascular pathologies,” she said.

“It takes a very long time to narrow down from one area of the genome to the specific gene that causes disease and I sought out postdoc training to learn how to do this.”—Adelaide Tovar, Ph.D.

In very controlled experimental conditions, Tovar studies cell models of interest in diabetes (beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin in response to glucose). With this NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 funding, she will apply CRISPR gene editing techniques to knock out these genes or engineer specific base pairs to replicate the exact mutations presented by diabetic patients. She will then use large-scale assays of variant effects and genomic sequencing to study the impact of these genetic variants on gene regulation and other cellular functions like metabolism. In some cases, these genetic manipulations can mimic an actual patient’s condition, confirming and further informing clinical observations. In other situations, these manipulations provide prognostic information for patients who could present a novel mutation, and yield insights into general biology processes. Tovar is very grateful for this NIH support. She also thanks her undergraduate research assistants (Ellie Bloss, Miranda Jefferds, Hailey McMillen, Kirsten Nishino) whose work contributed to writing this grant proposal.

"Of all the many talented scientists I've worked with throughout my career in both industry and academia, Dr. Tovar is simply fantastic. Our immediate team and broader colleagues are so fortunate to be working with her, and this competitive award is such a nice way to recognize her exceptional talents."—Stephen CJ Parker, Ph.D., Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Human Genetics, and Biostatistics

Mentoring

As a Latina and a first-generation high school and college graduate, Tovar feels strongly about the significance of this background in her career interests and achievements. “My lived experience and previous training in culturally aware mentorship heavily influence how I interact with students, and I’m honored that this work has been recognized by the NIH MOSAIC R99/R00 award, alongside the science I proposed,” she said. 

Her contributions as a mentor and scientist have previously been recognized with a UROP Supplemental Funding from the University of Michigan (February and September 2023) and a Postdoctoral Diversity Enrichment Program, Burroughs Wellcome Fund (2022–2025).

"Dr. Tovar is an emerging leader working at the intersection of complex traits and functional genomics. Her creativity and rigor are an inspiration to all of us - especially the cadre of young scientists she has mentored!"—Jacob Kitzman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Human Genetics and Associate Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics

In addition to her outstanding scientific research, Tovar is also a very dedicated mentor and feels inspired by all the mentors she has had all along her journey. She defines good mentors as open-minded, kind, supportive and who provide a good environment in the lab. And these are the values she embraces and lives by. “I love science, but the teaching and mentoring aspects are what I get the most enjoyment from,” she said. “I love seeing students grow their confidence and making them feel that they belong here, as scientists.”

Further acknowledging the importance of mentors, she added: “As a student, we’re trained to do everything perfectly to have good grades, but we need to turn that off when doing science because a lot of it is about failures. And failures are where new ideas and new directions can come from. Mentors have to be supportive when we fail, which happens a lot of the time.”

“You need to take your failures toward the future. And this is completely counter to what you’ve spent the first 18 years of your life thinking.” —Adelaide Tovar, Ph.D.

Trajectory

As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2011–2015, Tovar worked in a chemical engineering lab headed by Dr. Darrell Irvine and supervised by Dr. Greg Szeto. Her project focused on building drug delivery systems for cancers, but she was most interested in understanding why these drugs worked and shifted her focus to systems biology. She did her graduate training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with Dr. Samir Kelada who introduced her to complex traits and using statistics to link different variants within the genome to susceptibility for diseases. For her doctoral dissertation, she applied these approaches to study gene-environment interactions with air pollution and respiratory diseases. She received her PhD in 2021 and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School in the Parker and Kitzman labs since then.

Before college, Tovar was a French horn player for 10 years and was interested in many different career paths. Ironically, she didn’t like biology until she took a requisite biology course during her first year in college. Her advice to future students is to try many things and stay open-minded. Outside the lab, Tovar lives by her recommendation, and she loves to cook, bake, run, bike, read, knit and keep up to date with celebrity gossip!