Research in the Justice lab merges mouse modeling with clinical genetics to inform epigenetic disease mechanisms and develop treatment strategies. To understand complex human diseases, model organisms are established to confirm causes, study molecular and cellular mechanisms and develop preventative and therapeutic interventions. Throughout her career, Justice has used mutagenesis screens in mouse models to uncover transcriptional mechanisms in disease, developing and exploiting genomic strategies for gene identification. Now, her program has converged on epigenetics, a field that studies how changes in DNA and its associated proteins can affect inheritance of traits through multiple generations, and regulate wide-spread gene expression and genome stability. Genetic tricks are used to ask questions about mammalian gene function and genome organization. Mouse models are used to identify pathways for disease pathology that may identify therapeutic targets.