Lena was a Singapore A-Star student in the laboratory who pioneered genomic and proteomic studies of the mammalian SWI/SNF-like BAF complexes and discovered that ES cells have a specialized complex apparently devoted to pluripotency.  Her studies also dispelled several old biases about how chromatin remodeling proteins function.  She found that STAT3, an signaling transcription factor essential for LIF signaling and pluripotency is recruited to its sites of action over the genome by esBAF complexes, that these complexes are primarily repressors of transcription and that their specialized subunit composition engages the pluriopotency factors to provide robustness and stability to the pluripotent state.  She discovered that an underlying mechanism of their role in gene activation is to remove polycomb marks over the genome, particular at sites of STAT3 function.  She is now back in Singapore and can be reached at lena.ho at imb.a-star.edu.sg.