She received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her graduate degree from Northwestern Medical School. Dr. Emerling is an expert is phosphoinositide signaling and was the first to identify a family of ‘druggable’ enzymes whose loss of function results in synthetic lethality with p53 loss. Prior to her discovery of this synthetic lethality, this novel class of phosphoinositide enzymes, the phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate 4-kinases (PI5P4Ks), were not a focus for oncology research or cancer metabolism. Her current work focuses on determining the role of PI5P4K in p53 deficient cancers, especially the triple negative subgroup where targeted therapies have not been effective.