A Dash for the finish line, with help from GetHIRED!

11/21/2025

By Kate Windsor

Meet Soma Dash, an assistant professor in the RNA Institute at the State University of New York—Albany and alumni of the Society for Developmental Biology GetHIRED! program. Her lab studies how transcriptional disruption can lead to craniofacial birth defects. Dash started her academic journey in India, where she discovered her love of bench science. There, "you get to see the science happening as it is happening," Dash said.

She came to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree in the biomedical field and started a master's program at the University of Delaware. After an extremely productive summer which resulted in authorship on two manuscripts over 3 months, her graduate advisor Salil Lachke offered to transfer her into a Ph.D. program. By the second year of her Ph.D., Dash knew that she wanted to land an academic principal investigator position. She told her advisor, "I want to be in your chair in a few years," to which Lachke responded, "OK, let's figure out how to get you there."

After completing her Ph.D., Dash joined Paul Trainor’s lab at the Stowers Institute in Missouri to study how disruptions in neural crest development lead to craniofacial anomalies. As her postdoctoral work progressed and she shifted towards entering the job market, her colleagues pointed her towards SDB’s GetHIRED! program, a 12-week course designed to help postdocs succeed in the academic job market. Dash signed on.

"It definitely helped," Dash said. The most valuable parts, she recalled, were peer review of application materials, and practice interviews using real questions from committee members. Through iterative rounds of feedback on the written materials, Dash learned how to simplify her niche language.

"It has to be thought through with the idea that anyone with a biology degree should be able to understand this, because the application is read by a lot of people, and it has to make sense to every one of them," she said.

The mock interviews also helped Dash to think through all possible questions that she might be asked, including navigating sensitive topics.

"Like, the question of being subtly asked as a woman if you were married and have kids, how do you respond to that question?" Dash asked. "If I hadn't thought it through from GetHIRED!, I probably would have given a very awkward answer."

With the support and guidance of the GetHIRED! program, Dash succeeded in landing an assistant professor position at the University of Albany, where she has expanded her postdoctoral work on craniofacial anomalies in her own lab as a principal investigator.

Dash's newly established lab is focused on developing a tool that can diagnose craniofacial abnormalities early in gestation, before defects are established. Craniofacial abnormalities are one of the most common birth defects. They range from lethal, such as holoprosencephaly, in which the forebrain of a fetus fails to properly divide into two separate hemispheres during early pregnancy, to more mild defects such as cleft lip or cleft palate, which are treatable but impact quality of life.

"Right now, our treatment options for craniofacial anomalies are multiple surgeries for a lifetime," Dash explained. "We don't have any therapeutic interventions, so my long-term goal is to figure out a therapeutic intervention that can be given early during gestation."

Dash made a major step towards that goal by identifying a key molecular mechanism. In a September 2025 bioRxiv preprint, Dash and her co-authors used a drug which inhibits the HIF1α transcription factor to fully rescue the craniofacial abnormalities and embryonic lethality caused by knocking out a multiprotein complex critical to transcriptional regulation and downstream neural crest cell development. This discovery establishes the regulatory complex as a potential therapeutic target in congenital craniofacial disorders.

"I was just running around telling people about the rescue experiments for weeks on end," Dash said. "The mutant doesn't look like a mutant anymore, it just looks like a control now, and it survives to after gestation."

Now, with the resources of a principal investigator, Dash is able to independently explore and make progress towards therapeutic intervention for congenital craniofacial birth defects, a position she achieved with the help of SDB's GetHIRED! program.

"I used those resources until I signed the dotted line," Dash said.

Last Updated 11/21/2025