Romell received his B.A. in neuroscience from Pomona College in Claremont, California and his Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. His doctoral thesis focus was the role of aquaporin-5 regulation and trafficking in ocular lens homeostasis. Lenticular aquaporins such as aquaporin-5 are critical to lens water regulation and thereby essential for lens transparency. He identified aquaporin-5 trafficking via unconventional protein secretion in the bovine lens, which represents the first report of unconventional protein secretion by an aquaporin and of a cytoplasmic protein in the ocular lens. He also contributed to work investigating age-related proteome remodeling and cell-cell junctional protein distributions in the ocular lens.
At TGen, Romell is a postdoctoral fellow in the Pirrotte Lab where his research focus is acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) under the Lennar project. He is investigating these two rare and aggressive forms of cancer as part of a collaborative effort with the City of Hope using single-cell proteomics methodology coupled with next-generation proteomics platforms available in TGen’s Integrated Mass Spectrometry Shared Resource (IMS-SR).
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