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Research Interests
Dr. Richter's research group is broadly interested in studying how nuclear receptors and their coregulators module chromatin organization and gene expression. Specifically, the lab is starting out studying the functions of the nuclear receptor RAR-alpha by pharmaceutically screening for coregulators important to RARa function in human cell culture models. The lab is also approaching this broader question from an in vitro angle by purifying RARa and testing various aspects of its binding capacity on nucleosome-bound DNA. The Richter lab applies methods spanning biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics and is especially interested in long-read sequencing-based footprinting to observe nucleosome locations on intact chromatin fibers.
Education
- B.S., Beloit College, 2015
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2022
- Postdoc, The J. David Gladstone Institutes, 2022-2026
Publications
Frater, R.C.M., Rejnholdt Jensen, R., Ollé López, J., Flury, V., van den Berg, J., Humbert, J., Bournonville, A., Alcaraz, N., Wang, S., Richter, H.J., et al. (2026). Maintenance of nucleosome organization through replication and transcription counteracts aberrant coalescence of active chromatin. Molecular Cell. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2026.07.028.
*Yang, M.G., *Richter, H.J., *Wang, S., McNally, C.P., Moore, C.M., Emadi, A., Harris, N.E., Dhillon, S., Maresca, M., Pan, H., et al. (2026). Pervasive and programmed nucleosome distortion on single chromatin fibres. Nature 654, 513–522. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10418-6.
Inoue, S., Emmett, M.J., Lim, H.-W., Midha, M., Richter, H.J., Celwyn, I.J., Mehmood, R., Chondronikola, M., Klein, S., Hauck, A.K., et al. (2024). Short-term cold exposure induces persistent epigenomic memory in brown fat. Cell Metabolism. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2024.05.011.
Richter, H.J., Hauck, A.K., Batmanov, K., Inoue, S.-I., So, B.N., Kim, M., Emmett, M.J., Cohen, R.N., and Lazar, M.A. (2022). Balanced control of thermogenesis by nuclear receptor corepressors in brown adipose tissue. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, e2205276119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2205276119.
Hu, W., Jiang, C., Kim, M., Xiao, Y., Richter, H.J., Guan, D., Zhu, K., Krusen, B.M., Roberts, A.N., Miller, J., et al. (2022). Isoform-specific functions of PPARγ in gene regulation and metabolism. Genes Dev. 36, 300–312. https://doi.org/10.1101/gad.349232.121.
Adlanmerini, M., Carpenter, B.J., Remsberg, J.R., Aubert, Y., Peed, L.C., Richter, H.J., and Lazar, M.A. (2019). Circadian lipid synthesis in brown fat maintains murine body temperature during chronic cold. PNAS 116, 18691–18699. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909883116.
Emmett, M.J., Lim, H.-W., Jager, J., Richter, H.J., Adlanmerini, M., Peed, L.C., Briggs, E.R., Steger, D.J., Ma, T., Sims, C.A., et al. (2017). Histone Deacetylase 3 Prepares Brown Adipose Tissue For Acute Thermogenic Challenge. Nature 546, 544–548. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22819.