Sarah Rashid is a Ph.D. student at the University of Western Australia researching the role of osteoclasts in bone diseases such as osteoporosis. The main aim of her research is the identification of new pharmaceutical targets that can potentially be used to treat bone disease by targeting osteoclast differentiation and function. By performing in vitro assays using differentiated human osteoclasts and subsequent quantitation of gene expression using RNA-seq, Sarah has characterised the osteoclast transcriptome and identified a number of novel genes involved in osteoclastogenesis. She has also used sophisticated bioinformatics tools to identify the primary biological pathways that are activated during osteoclast differentiation. Sarah is now focused on integrating the osteoclast-specific datasets that she has generated with genome-wide association study (GWAS) and expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) summary results from studies on bone phenotypes to identify the most clinically relevant osteoclast genes. She is also working on DNA methylation array data generated during the course of the human osteoclast assays to identify differentially methylation regions (DMR) involved in switching genes on and off during osteoclastogenesis. Overall, her study will determine new potential targets that are involved in osteoclastogenesis and will help to design new therapeutic targets for the treatment of osteoporosis.