When I entered graduate school at the University of Arizona in 2012, I began studying how risk for complex disease is influenced by genetics, environment, and development. I became fascinated as I learned that exposures to diverse microorganisms in early life, especially within the first year, greatly influence risk for complex diseases, like asthma. Why was the environment so important? And why was the first year of life so critical to disease pathogenesis? I hoped to find a dissertation project that would allow me to investigate these questions on a deeper level.
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One of the reasons I sought Dr. Donata Vercelli as my mentor was not only her expertise in the asthma and allergy fields, but the way in which she incorporated a diverse set of analytical tools and experimental models to understand gene-environment interactions in different developmental contexts and their impact on asthma pathogenesis. While I was interested by all the projects in the Vercelli lab, I felt drawn to a project that was studying epigenetic modifications (which are involved at the mechanistic intersection of genetics, environment, and development) to understand whether immune cells from at birth could tell us anything about the development of asthma during childhood. This project provided the perfect opportunity for me to begin studying the early origins of disease and I immediately recognized the potential of the study design, which involved data and samples from the Infant Immune Study (IIS) birth cohort, a population-based study at the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center. Using this human birth cohort as our anchor, my colleagues and I began to address a critical set of unanswered questions: does the trajectory to asthma begin at birth and, if so, does this trajectory involve epigenetic mechanisms? Long story short, we showed for the first time that children who became asthmatic during the first decade of life already had an altered immune epigenome at birth! This suggested to us that prenatal factors may have ultimately led to asthma and provided a rationale to hypothesize whether the trajectory to asthma begins even earlier, that is, in utero. Separate work from the IIS cohort supported this hypothesis, showing that the mother’s immune environment during pregnancy was associated with asthma in her child.

Fast forward a few years, I’m now a post-doctoral research associate, still working in the Vercelli lab. I became involved in several other projects, all of which are linked to different environments and their impact on asthma inception. My main project, however, was designed as a continuation of my dissertation work. Once again, my colleagues and I leveraged data from the IIS birth cohort and relied on a novel mother-to-child framework to show that the maternal prenatal immune environment shapes the neonatal immune epigenome as well as neonatal innate immune responses to microbial stimuli, all of which relates to asthma risk (PMID: 35841380). More importantly, we discovered that the neonates with the lowest risk for asthma had higher innate immune responses to microbial stimuli, which is indicative of innate immune memory or “trained immunity.” I am eager to start a new line of investigation to begin understanding how microbial exposures during pregnancy influence innate immune memory at birth and to determine the impact on innate immune responses to microbes over the first year of life.
 
My training is in cellular and molecular biology with an emphasis in bioinformatics. I use computational approaches to analyze different omics technologies from distinct, yet integrated, experimental models to gain insights into how environmental and developmental factors influence asthma pathogenesis. If you’d like to hear more about my research, feel free to email me at [email protected]. 

Dr. Avery Ann DeVries was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Development Grant (PRDG) from the University of Arizona for a project titled “Environmental Influences on Innate Immune Response and its Role in Childhood Asthma”​​.

​Scientific research is an important aspect of my life. Thanks to Science, humans learned so much about Nature and improved their lives. However, there is a downside given that many discoveries were used inappropriately. Remember, for instance, about nuclear weapons and exposure to leaded gasoline. Irresponsible human activities have led to accelerating climate change, heavy metal pollution in soil, and microplastic in our food. We have only one planet and we need to protect our Earth for ourselves and for the benefit of our children.
 
My name is Filip and I have a peculiar surname, Pošćić (I bet you can't pronounce it correctly). Those strange symbols are not simple accents but diacritical marks making different letters from “s” and “c” in the Croatian alphabet, and with no equivalent sounds in English. I would write an approximate pronunciation as “Poshtjitj” or [Poʃtɕitɕ] (according to the International Phonetic Alphabet). The letter š is pronounced similarly to “sh” in “shell”, and ć as if you would pronounce “y” in “yellow” by holding your mouth as to say “t” in “tap”. It’s complicated, I know, and I am fine if you will write “Poscic”.
 
As a child, my father gave me a book about Nature as a gift. I was a little small to fully understand that book at the time, but I enjoyed looking at the figures and I fell in love with the amazing beauty of natural landscapes and the biological variation. I soon decided to work in and for Nature. At that age I didn’t fully understand what does it means to work “in and for” Nature but I guess I accomplished my dream: I am a UofA post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Alicja Babst-Kostecka, in the Environmental Science (https://environmentalscience.cals.arizona.edu/) doing my best to 1) educate people to preserve nature and reduce pollution and 2) studying the amazing metal hyperaccumulator plants that can clean the soils from heavy metals. I will now write a few more words about hyperaccumulators.
 
Metal hyperaccumulator plants are only approximately 0.3% of the total plant species in the world and they can accumulate extraordinarily high concentrations of one, two, or three specific heavy metals in their leaves. To name a few of these outstanding species: Arabidopsis halleri, hyperaccumulating both zinc and cadmium; Biscutella laevigata, hyperaccumulating thallium; and Noccaea caerulescens, hyperaccumulating zinc, cadmium, and nickel. The listed metals, often commonly but erroneously called heavy metals, are present in large quantities in mining and surrounding areas making a toxic environment to other living beings, including humans. The amazing feature of hyperaccumulators is we could use these plants for cleaning up metal-contaminated soils that are unsafe for human life and agriculture. However, there is a problem: these plants are very small and, therefore, to effectively clean the soils you would need biomass plants, like the perennial switchgrass. As such, switchgrass is not a hyperaccumulator, but research is focused on understanding the metabolic pathways of hyperaccumulators and properly modifying biomass plants. The icing on the cake, biomass plants could be converted to biogas and metals could be extracted from residues gaining additional money (this is phytomining!).
 
As you could understand from reading so far, I am really into the physiology and ecology of plants, and I do not skip genetics and evolution! I studied at the University of Trieste (Italy) where I obtained my master’s degree in 2007 on nucleotide diversity in coding and regulatory genomic regions of maize. After a research project on metal tolerance and ecological characterization of Biscutella laevigata populations, I obtained the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Ecology in 2012 at the University of Udine (Italy) with a short stay (6 months) at the Free University Amsterdam (The Netherlands). From 2012 to 2016, I worked at the University of Udine and was awarded financial support for young scientists in 2013 for research on cerium toxicity in plants. From 2016 to 2019, I went back to my home country and worked at the Institute for Adriatic Crops and Karst Reclamation in Split (Croatia) and at Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb (Croatia) on soil-plant interactions and nutrient deficiencies, and trace element toxicity in olive trees. I was also honored in 2019 by receiving the most prestigious and competitive European fellowship, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship in Prof. Dr. Ute Krämer Department of Molecular Genetics and Physiology of Plants at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Have a look at my former research https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/845234 where I was investigating the variability in hyperaccumulation of zinc and cadmium between individuals of the same Arabidopsis halleri population.
 
At the beginning of January 2022, I finally started working at the University of Arizona, and currently, my research is focused on plant adaptations to soils with high metals as well as collaborative projects on physiology and ecology. We are a young lab growing very fast and we like to collaborate with you! I am also particularly thirsty for knowledge in biostatistics. I developed early my wish to learn more about applied statistics because I found very often scientific publications with statistics misconceptions that lead to wrong conclusions! Research has always been at the heart of the development of human society. Every fundamental step for humans started from a little research, from a little idea. Every single datum obtained by researchers is necessary for the future to gain knowledge. If data are wrongly analyzed or interpreted this can be a recipe for a disaster.
 
If you would like to know more on how plants can clean toxic soils or discuss any of the above topics do not hesitate to contact me by email ([email protected]), Twitter (@FilipPoscic), or Instagram (linkedin.com/in/filipposcic).