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:
March 2024: HITAG manuscript accepted into Science Advances, congrats team! 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.
May 2023: Our great visiting students Xinlin, Hongda, Liudeng and Kana have all returned to their undergraduate institutions. They will all be sorely missed and we wish them luck in their future graduate studies.
April 2023: Two amazing graduate students from the UCSD BMS program, Isabella Ruud and Benjamin Albert join the lab! They’ll be looking to exploit the power of protein language models to help us engineer designer proteins.
February 2023: Andrea Lara a visiting student from Spain joins the team and Debbie successfully defends her thesis (making it look easy)!
December 2022: Three new visiting students Shiye Chen, Hongda Yin, and Kana Ren have joined our team. It’s great having more bright young faces in the lab eager to develop the next generation of high-throughput tools.
October 2022: Welcoming to the lab Chris Fazekas a talented junior researcher that recently graduated from NYU. Chris will be joining the drug screening team and work with Ji Won to identify novel chemical scaffolds and further develop our screening platform.
October 2022: Lab officially opens at UCSD and we’ve already hit the ground running with some exciting collaborative projects with various labs across the campus.
September 2022: After 5 amazing years at Columbia and meeting some awesome scientists/friends the lab is going to be making a big move from Columbia to the University of California San Diego. Looking forward to the next big adventure!