Ross A. Poché, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology at Baylor College of Medicine. For the past 25 years, I have employed mouse genetics and molecular biology to investigate the mechanisms of gene regulation that influence the development of the brain, eye, and craniofacial skeleton.

As one of a set of identical triplets—essentially a genetic clone of my brothers—my fascination with genetics has deep personal roots. Meeting the three of us is like encountering a naturally occurring genetic experiment in progress. Despite sharing an identical DNA sequence, we are remarkably different individuals. While we have all pursued careers in academia, one of my brothers is a visual artist (I can barely draw a stick figure), and the other is a fiction writer, whereas I dedicate my work to uncovering and communicating biological truths. These differences highlight a central theme in my research: we are far more than the sum of our genes. It is gene regulation—how our genome is interpreted and expressed—that shapes the complexity of individual identity.