Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics, and Structural Biology (BQBS) Track

Karen S. Anderson is a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. She is involved in teaching undergraduates and graduate students about drug discovery and structure-based drug design. She also serves as an undergraduate research mentor and is a fellow at Pierson College at Yale serving as a undergraduate freshman advisor. Dr. Anderson's research utilizes mechanistic enzymology and structure-based drug design. Her work focuses on understanding how enzymes, playing critical roles in such diseases as cancer and infectious diseases, including AIDS, work at a molecular level. She uses that information to develop new drug therapies. She has trained over 50 undergraduates, graduate students, M.D./Ph.D. students and postdoctoral students who have gone on to graduate school and medical school as well as successful careers in academia and industry and who are involved in biomedical research.

Valerie Horsley began her scientific training as an undergraduate at Furman University and was awarded her Ph.D. from Emory University. After completing a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Elaine Fuchs’ laboratory at Rockefeller University, Valerie started her independent laboratory at Yale University in the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology. Horsley’s lab uses the mouse as a genetic model system to study how adult stem cells within epithelial tissues maintain tissue homeostasis, can contribute to wound healing, and can be a factor in cancer formation. She is now the Maxine F. Singer Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale, has received a number of awards including the Pew Scholar Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award.

• 2001 – 2013 Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany
• 1999-2001 Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology, University of Washington Medical School, Seattle, WA
• 1998-1999 Staff Scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle WA
• 1996-1997 Postdoc at EMBL in Heidelberg Germany
• 1991-1996 Postdoc at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle WA

Research in the Schlieker laboratory focuses on furthering our understanding of nuclear protein quality control and the relationship between nuclear membrane proteins and human disease.

Karen S. Anderson is a Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. She is involved in teaching undergraduates and graduate students about drug discovery and structure-based drug design. She also serves as an undergraduate research mentor and is a fellow at Pierson College at Yale serving as a undergraduate freshman advisor. Dr. Anderson's research utilizes mechanistic enzymology and structure-based drug design. Her work focuses on understanding how enzymes, playing critical roles in such diseases as cancer and infectious diseases, including AIDS, work at a molecular level. She uses that information to develop new drug therapies. She has trained over 50 undergraduates, graduate students, M.D./Ph.D. students and postdoctoral students who have gone on to graduate school and medical school as well as successful careers in academia and industry and who are involved in biomedical research.

Dr. Bahmanyar received her undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.  She was a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Karen Oegema at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UC San Diego where she recognized the advantages of the early C. elegans embryo as a tractable model system to dissect mechanisms that control nuclear envelope dynamics to ensure genome protection. Her post-doctoral work with elucidated an important new principle involving local regulation of phospholipid synthesis in specifying the nuclear envelope domain within the continuous endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Her work now is focused on elucidating mechanisms underpinning regulatory roles for lipid composition and dynamics in nuclear envelope and ER membrane remodeling and genome protection. 

Julien Berro was initially trained in Applied Mathematics, Physics and Computer Sciences at the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble, France. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematical Modeling in Biology at Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France, where he worked with Jean-Louis Martiel and Laurent Blanchoin on mathematical models for actin filament biochemistry and mechanics. After a brief tenure as an assistant professor in the department of Mathematics at Université Claude Bernard, Lyon, France, he decided to further his training by learning cell biology and quantitative microscopy in the laboratory of Tom Pollard at Yale University. Since he started his own laboratory in 2013, he has combined experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches to uncover the mechanisms of molecular machineries that produce forces in the cell, with a particular focus on the actin cytoskeleton and endocytosis.

Joerg Bewersdorf is a Professor of Cell Biology and of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. He received his Master's degree (Dipl. Phys., 1998) and his doctoral degree in physics (Dr. rer. nat., 2002) training with Dr. Stefan W. Hell at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. After 4 years at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, he relocated his research group to Yale University in 2009. An optical physicist/biophysicist by training, Dr. Bewersdorf has been a long-time contributor to the field of super-resolution light microscopy development and the application of these techniques to cell biological questions.

Dr. Bleichert’s research focuses on understanding the operating principles of macromolecular machines involved in chromosome replication and in the maintenance of genome stability using a combination of structural biology, biochemical, biophysical, and cellular approaches. She obtained her PhD from Yale University in 2010 working on ribosome biogenesis, and afterwards performed her postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, and then at Johns Hopkins Medical School. As a postdoctoral fellow, she determined the structure of the eukaryotic initiator complex, a key component in the assembly pathway of the DNA replication machinery. Since 2017, Dr. Bleichert has been an independent research group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. She will join Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry as an Assistant Professor in January 2020.

Dr. Boggon is a structural biologist interested in the molecular basis of cytosolic signal transduction cascades. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, U.K., and postdoctoral studies at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (at Harvard Medical School). His lab is interested in understanding how RhoGTPase signal transduction pathways are regulated at the molecular level, and the molecular basis for acquisition of cerebrovascular disorders.

Demetrios Braddock was born in Tennessee, educated at the University of Chicago, trained at the NIH in Anatomic Pathology and Biophysical Chemistry, and came to Yale in 2004. He practices Hematopathology and leads a laboratory that studies the ENPP enzymes – a family of extracellular enzymes regulating hemostasis, bone mineralization, and vascular development. These studies have progressed to the development of biologic therapeutics for vascular calcification disorders.

Dr. Breaker is a Sterling Professor of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University, is jointly appointed as a professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His graduate studies with Dr. Peter Gilham at Purdue University focused on the synthesis of RNA and the catalytic properties of nucleic acids. As a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Gerald Joyce at The Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Breaker pioneered a variety of in vitro evolution strategies to isolate novel RNA enzymes and was the first to discover catalytic DNAs or “deoxyribozymes” using this technology. Since establishing his laboratory at Yale in 1995, Dr. Breaker has continued to conduct research on the advanced functions of nucleic acids, including ribozyme reaction mechanisms, molecular switch technology, next-generation biosensors, and catalytic DNA engineering. In addition, his laboratory has established the first proofs that metabolites are directly bound by messenger RNA elements called riboswitches. Dr. Breaker’s research findings have been published in more than 220 scientific papers, book chapters, and patent applications, and his research has been funded by grants from the NIH, NSF, DARPA, the Hereditary Disease Foundation, and from several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Hellman Family Trust. In recognition of his research accomplishments at Yale, Dr. Breaker received the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize (1997), the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology (2005), the Molecular Biology Award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006), and the Merck Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2016). Dr. Breaker was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He has cofounded two biotechnology companies and is a scientific advisor for industry and for various government agencies. He serves on the editorial board for the scientific journals RNA Biology, RNA, and Cell Chemical Biology.

David Breslow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. David received an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 2004, working in the laboratory of Dr. Stuart Schreiber. David then did his graduate work at the University of California, San Francisco in Dr. Jonathan Weissman’s lab. There he developed new high-throughput functional genomic tools for budding yeast and defined the function of Orm family proteins in sphingolipid homeostasis. As a postdoctoral fellow, David worked with Dr. Maxence Nachury at Stanford University, where he used a semi-permeabilized cell system to study protein entry into primary cilia and developed a CRISPR/Cas9-based screening platform to investigate ciliary signaling. A central focus of David’s work has been applying new systematic approaches to address fundamental questions in cell biology, with a current emphasis on the regulation and functions of the mammalian primary cilium. David joined the Yale MCDB faculty in January 2017.

A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Prof. Gary Brudvig earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Yale faculty in 1982. In addition to serving as a professor in and chair of the Department of Chemistry, he is also Director of the Energy Sciences Institute on Yale's West Campus, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and is affiliated with the Yale Center for Green Chemistry.

Brudvig is the project leader of a team of Yale chemists and other scientists who, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, are hoping to improve the efficiency of solar-energy utilization. Its aim is to attach manganese complexes to titanium dioxide nanoparticles in order to develop a system that will efficiently produce renewable fuel using solar energy.

From 1983 to 1986, Brudvig was a Searle Scholar at Yale. The Searle Scholarship program supports outstanding work by junior faculty members at select academic institutions. He was the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar, a distinction given to “talented young faculty in the chemical sciences,” from 1985 to 1990. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow 1986-1988.

Brudvig was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

Dr. Chang graduated with a BS from Yale College in 1988, and obtained his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD from Rockefeller University in 1997. He completed residency in Clinical Pathology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and did his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ronald DePinho at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, before joining the faculty at Yale Medical School as a tenured Associate Professor in 2010. Dr. Chang's research interests focuses on how telomeres, protein/DNA structures at the ends of chromosomes, are properly maintained to protect chromosome ends from engaging a DNA damage response.

Dr. Chang is the recipient of numerous awards, including those from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Ellsion Medical Foundation, the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Ellis Benson Award from the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists. He was elected into the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2009.

Beginning in 2017, Dr. Chang is also the Associate Dean of Science Education and Quantitative Reasoning and Undergraduate Research at Yale College.

The Cheng laboratory studies the action of antiviral drugs against HBV, HIV, EBV, and HCV, as well as the discovery of antivirals with unique mode of action against those viruses.

Dr. Crews is the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology at Yale University. He graduated from the U.Virginia with a B.A. in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Biochemistry. Dr. Crews has a foothold in both the academic and biotech arenas; on the faculty at Yale since 1995, his laboratory has pioneered the use of small molecules to control intracellular protein levels. In 2003, he co-founded Proteolix, Inc., whose proteasome inhibitor, Kyprolis™ received FDA approval for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Since Proteolix’s purchase by Onyx Pharmaceuticals in 2009, Dr. Crews has focused on a new drug development technology, which served as the founding intellectual property for his latest New Haven-based biotech venture, Arvinas, Inc. Currently, Dr. Crews serves on several editorial boards and was Editor of Cell Chemical Biology (2008-2018). In addition, he has received numerous awards and honors, including the 2013 CURE Entrepreneur of the Year Award, 2014 Ehrlich Award for Medicinal Chemistry, 2015 Yale Cancer Center Translational Research Prize, a NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award (2015),  the AACR Award for Chemistry in Cancer Research (2017), Khorana Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry (2018), Pierre Fabre Award for Therapeutic Innovation (2018), and the Pharmacia-ASPET Award for Experimental Therapeutics (2019).  In 2019, he was named an American Cancer Society Professor.

Caitlin obtained her Ph.D. with Prof. Brian Dyer at Emory University in 2015. During that time, she developed and applied structurally-specific time-resolved infrared techniques to probe fast protein dynamics in vitro. From 2015-2019, Caitlin was a Center for the Physics of Living Cells Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Martin Gruebele at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a postdoc, she developed an in vitro mimic of the intracellular environment on protein folding and stability, and also expanded the in-cell Fast Relaxation Imaging (FReI) technique to bimolecular reactions and whole organisms. 

In 2020, Caitlin started her own lab at Yale University, where she currently investigates the mechanism and dynamics of protein and RNA interactions inside cells. To achieve this goal, her group uses a combination of time-resolved infrared and fluorescence spectral imaging at multiple scales, from in vitro to single cell to whole organism. This quantitative biophysical approach is used to address kinetic questions that require characterization in the complex, heterogenous environment of the cell. This includes phase-separated bio-condensates, pre-mRNA splicing, and "quinary" RNA interactions.