Vicki Chandler received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco.  She also has a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry, which she received from the University of California, Berkeley. Here at the University of Arizona she teaches Advanced Genetics and Concepts in Genetics.  She has also been a guest lecturer for a number of courses, including Methods in Cell Biology and Genomics, Biology 181 honors, and Women in Sciences. In 2001 Dr. Chandler received the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Researchers of the Year Award and in 2002 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Her research program investigates the regulation of gene expression. The anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway in maize is the focus of their work, as it provides an exceptionally tractable system for genetic, biochemical and molecular approaches. A major emphasis in their research is to investigate how the regulatory genes of this pathway are controlled. These regulatory genes, which encode transcription factors that activate the anthocyanin biosynthetic genes, have multiple alleles that produce distinct developmental and tissue-specific patterns of anthocyanin pigments. In addition, they have identified negatively acting modifier genes that reduce the expression of the biosynthetic and regulatory genes. Identifying the cis-acting sequences regulating differential expression, and factors that interact with these sequences should provide important information on mechanisms of gene regulation, applicable to numerous plant systems. In addition, the availability of regulatory sequences that can control expression in distinct tissues and developmental stages will greatly enhance the potential of genetic engineering. They are also using this system to investigate mechanisms of gene silencing, which has a fundamental role in development of all organisms and has recently become a major problem with genetic engineering approaches to crop improvement. They use both forward and reverse genetic approaches to study paramutation, the regulation of transposable elements and transgene silencing. Paramutation is a mitotically and meiotically heritable change in gene expression that is induced by allele interactions. They have demonstrated that the heritable change is accompanied by a ten- to twenty-fold reduction in transcription. Recently they have used a combination of classical genetics, genomics, and molecular methods to identify and characterize the minimal sequences required for paramutation, which map within 99-106 kbp upstream of the transcription initiation site. They have also identified multiple mutations in other genes required for the establishment and maintenance of paramutation. They have shown that these mutants also activate previously silent transposable elements and transgenes, indicating that the wild type proteins are required for multiple gene-silencing processes. Experiments are in progress to clone the genes represented by these mutations and determine their role in gene silencing. As heritable changes in chromatin structure are clearly involved in the establishment and maintenance of distinct transcription states they are also pursuing a functional genomics approach to understand chromatin-level control of gene expression in both maize and Arabidopsis.