About the lab:
Our work employs a variety of techniques ranging from oligo chip synthesis and library-based screening to iPS cell differentiation and live-cell imaging. We utilize a variety of model systems ranging from yeast to human cell culture to assure that the technologies we generate are applicable to a broad swath of the scientific community.
Our research group strives to push the boundaries of genetic engineering and synthetic biology by developing methods with which to manipulate eukaryotic genomes and probe biological phenomena in high-throughput. We apply these tools ourselves or through collaboration with a particular focus towards understanding neurobiology and infectious disease.
Our team places a strong emphasis on mentoring, and values the opportunity to be able to train the next generation of budding scientists.
Lab news:
December 2024: Visiting undergraduate researcher Randy Tang rounds up his visit in the lab. Good luck Randy on graduate school applications!
December 2024: Alex K. and Bruce defend their thesis. The lab won’t be the same without them and we are all truly excited to see the amazing things they accomplish in their careers.
December 2024: Debbie’s paper on multiplexed drug screening is accepted to Molecular Systems Biology!
October 2024: Marley gives an awesome thesis defense on her work engineering new CRISPR activators.
August 2024: Andrea Pence a jointly advised PharmD, PhD student joins the lab! She’ll be working with the protease engineering group to evolve proteases against new disease relevant targets.
July 2024: Joonwon Kim gets a faculty job offer from Seoul National University (SNU)!!!
July 2024: Xinyue (Lucy) Luo a visiting student from Zhejiang University joins the lab, she’ll be working with Larry to tackle our in vivo CRISPR screens.
July 2024: Chris Fazekas leaves the lab to prepare to start graduate school at NYU. He’ll be missed from the MAVDA screening team and we wish him the best of luck on the next stage of his research journey.
June 2024: Ziyi leaves the lab to return to her undergrad institution and complete her degree. The MAVDA team won’t be the same without you, and we wish you the best of luck on PhD applications.
May 2024: Shiye leaves the lab to start graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. Always great to have our students move on to bigger and better things, good luck Shiye!
April 2024: Benji is awarded a prestigious NSF fellowship! Congrats Benji, keep being awesome.
March 2024: HITAG manuscript accepted into Science Advances, congrats team! A short video describing the paper is here. Tons more to come from this method, stay tuned :-)
March 2024: Two amazing graduate students, Reema Apte (BMS) and Gianna Elias (Bioengineering) join the lab!
December 2023: Lab got a grant to support some ambitious in vivo HITAG work in collaboration with Bing Ren’s team. Our awesome visiting researcher Wenlin Zhang leaves the lab to go start her PhD at the National University of Singapore. She will be missed!
September 2023: Congrats to Isabella for successfully competing for a spot on the UCSD Genetics T32 training grant!
July 2023: Sad to see visiting undergraduate research Andrea Lara returns to Spain. At the same time we are welcoming two new visiting students Ziyi Sun and Wenlin Zhang, working on our multiplex drug screens and ML guided protein engineering projects, respectively.