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. 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 a  cerebrovascular disorder,  Cerebral Cavernous Malformations (CCM).

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.

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.

Enrique M. De La Cruz, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B) and Head of Branford College at Yale University. He is a first-generation Cuban-American who was raised in Newark, NJ. Dr. De La Cruz received his undergraduate degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from Rutgers University, Newark College of Arts and Sciences, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Beta Beta Honor Societies. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry, Cell & Molecular Biology (BCMB) with Dr. Thomas D. Pollard at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and received postdoctoral training in the laboratories of Drs. H. Lee Sweeney and E. Michael Ostap at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was a Visiting Scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) & Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France in 2009, a Mayent-Rothschild Senior Researcher Fellow at the Institut Curie, Paris in 2015, and an Invited Professor Fellow at ESPCI Paris Tech (école supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris), Paris in 2016 and in 2019.  Dr. De La Cruz’s research focuses on the actin cytoskeleton, molecular motor proteins, and nucleotide signaling enzymes. Dr. De La Cruz is actively involved with various scientific societies, journals and peer review committees, and actively participates in a number of outreach activities focused on enhancing minority participation and career development in the sciences.

The DiMaio laboratory is studying the molecular mechanisms of how two groups of tumor viruses, human papillomaviruses and polyomaviruses, enter cells, with a particular focus on identifying the cellular proteins that mediate virus entry and intracellular trafficking and determining their molecular mechanisms of action. In addition, it is using viral transmembrane proteins as a basis to develop a class of artificial small transmembrane proteins with a variety of biological activities, including the ability to form tumors and confer resistance to HIV infection. Some of these proteins are the simplest proteins ever described and their study will reveal new features of protein action and the basis for specificity in protein-protein interactions.

Nadya Dimitrova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Her research focuses on the functional characterization of tumor suppressor and oncogenic long non-coding RNAs and their roles in the regulation of the cancer transcriptome. Originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, Nadya graduated with an Sc.B. in Biochemistry from Brown University in 2002. She joined the graduate program at The Rockefeller University and in 2009 received a Ph.D. for her work on the signaling and repair of dysfunctional telomeres in the laboratory of Dr. Titia de Lange. For her graduate work, Nadya was awarded the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. As a postdoctoral fellow, Nadya joined the laboratory of Dr. Tyler Jacks at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT where she developed genetic mouse models to study long non-coding RNAs in cancer biology. Nadya is the recipient of the HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship, the Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, the Lung Cancer Research Foundation 2016 Scientific Merit Award, the V Scholar Award, and the Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research Award.

Donald Engelman progressed from a BA in Physics at Reed College and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from Yale, via Postdoctoral stays at The University of California at San Francisco and King's College London to join the Yale faculty. His research efforts have produced papers on a number of topics, but the main focus has been on the structure of biological membranes. Most recently, there has been intense effort on the uses of a pH dependent membrane insertion peptide to image and deliver molecules to the cells in acidic tissues, including tumors.
He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and has held several visiting appointments in Grenoble, Cambridge, Stanford, and Paris. He has served in a number of capacities at Yale, including Chair of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Chair of the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee, and Acting Dean of Yale College. Service outside of Yale includes numerous panels, study sections, councils, and committees at the National Institutes of Heath, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Ferguson’s research focuses on extracellular control of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), aberrant activation of which can drive cancer and other diseases.  Dr. Ferguson obtained her Ph.D. from Yale in 1996, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.  She transitioned to an independent faculty position in the Department of Physiology at UPenn in 2003, returning to Connecticut in 2015 to join the Yale Cancer Biology Institute and Department of Pharmacology.

The goal of research in my lab is to understand how the status of lysosomes is sensed and how lysosomal function is regulated to meet cellular demands. The basic building blocks (amino acids, sugars, lipids and nucleotides) released by degradation of lysosomal substrates represent important sources of energy during starvation and of material for new macromolecule synthesis to support cell growth and/or remodeling. Conversely, lysosomes are critical for the turnover and clearance from cells of damaged organelles and protein aggregates. The importance of maintaining optimal lysosomal function is illustrated by contributions of lysosome dysfunction to human neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Frontotemporal Dementia, Parkinson’s disease and lysosomal storage disorders such as Batten’s disease. Furthermore, the role played by lysosomes in sensing cellular energy and nutrient levels and transducing this information into signals controlling growth represents a potential therapeutic target in cancer. With this growing appreciation of the roles played by lysosomes in health and disease, we ultimately seek to address the following fundamental questions:

(A) How do cells sense and regulate the status of their lysosomes?

(B) How is lysosomal function altered in disease states?

(C) Can lysosomal function be modulated for therapeutic purposes?

To address these questions we combine live cell imaging to monitor the dynamic recruitment of proteins to lysosomes with proteomic approaches to define the molecular basis for this recruitment and high-throughput siRNA screening to identify new mechanisms controlling lysosomal homeostasis. Insights obtained through these strategies will contribute to answering fundamental cell biological questions concerning organelle homeostasis and are expected to be of direct relevance to human health.

I did my PhD thesis work in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UNC Chapel Hill from 1979-1985. In Dr. Gerry Oxford’s lab I received training in classical excitable membrane biophysics and used the then emergent technology of “patch clamping” to investigate the mechanism of voltage dependent Calcium channel modulation by biogenic amines in dorsal root ganglion (sensory) neurons.

In 1985, I joined Dr. Stephen Smith’s lab in the Section of Molecular Neurobiology and HHMI at YaleUniversity for post doctoral work. I maintained a keen interest in Calcium as a signaling molecule and was hoping to gain some experience in Calcium imaging to compliment my electrophysiological studies; however, by a quirk of scientific fate I began investigating neuronal growth cone motility using high resolution video enhanced DIC microscopy. This unexpected turn of events led me directly into the study of cell motility –a descriptive field of research at the time, especially when compared to the quantitative realm of ion channel biophysics which I was accustomed to. Working in cell motility necessitated learning about cytoskeletal protein dynamics and function, and I embarked on the road to becoming a cell biologist.

In 1989 I started my lab in the Department of Biology (now the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology) at Yale University. Our research initially focused on characterizing the cytoskeletal protein dynamics and molecular motor activity underlying growth cone motility. Over the years I have maintained an interest in understanding how classical signal transduction pathways (Ca, PKC, PKA, etc.) modulate cytoskeletal machinery to affect axon growth and guidance.

To investigate mechanisms of growth cone guidance, we developed an in vitro turning assay using silica bead substrates coated with attractive cell adhesion molecules. These bioassays were first used to identify signal transduction pathways involved in substrate dependent growth cone turning and to characterize the role traction forces play in axon advance. A role for src family tyrosine kinases as mechano-transduction sensors emerged from this work.

Recently we have been developing biophysical methods for measuring traction forces that growth cones exert on the underlying substrate while co-assessing cytoskeletal dynamics with fluorescently tagged proteins. These studies yield quantitative data amenable to mathematical modeling of the fundamental processes underlying neuronal growth and regenerative processes.

B.S. UCSD, 2000

Ph.D. Stanford University, 2008, Advisor: Zhi-Yong Wang

Postdoctoral Research, UCSD, Advisor: Steve Kay

Postdoctoral Research, UCSD, Advisor: Eric Bennett

Professor Gendron has 18 years of experience studying the genetic and molecular basis of how organisms react to environmental cues. He performed his Ph.D. in Dr. Zhi-Yong Wang’s lab at Stanford University/ Carnegie Institution for Science where he studied the brassinosteroid signaling pathway in Arabidopsis with an emphasis on discovering and mechanistically describing signaling pathway components. In addition, he described how brassinosteroids control growth and organogenesis. He performed his post-doctoral research in Dr. Steve Kay’s lab at the University of California, San Diego and University of Southern California where he investigated transcriptional networks in the circadian clock of Arabidopsis. He was funded by a Ruth L. Kirchstein NRSA award from the NIH. Furthermore, he spent one year as a visiting scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Bennett at University of California, San Diego studying mammalian protein degradation mechanisms and learning mass spectrometry techniques and analysis. As an assistant professor at Yale University, he runs a research program that reveals the interplay of protein degradation and daily timing mechanisms in eukaryotes using reverse genetics and biochemistry in the model plant Arabidopsis. His work impacts our understanding of how plants sense and respond to environmental cues with the goal of making crops robust to rapidly changing climates. The work in the laboratory is supported by the National Science Foundation.

The work in the Gendron lab focuses on how protein degradation controls the circadian clock in plants. The lab using protein engineering, mass spectrometry, and forward and reverse genetic approaches to investigate how the ubiquitin proteasome system couples the circadian clock to downstream biological processes such as metabolism, cell growth, and cell differentiation.

After graduating from Harvard with a A.B. in physics in 1989, Prof. Mark Gerstein earned a doctorate in theoretical chemistry and biophysics from Cambridge University in 1993. He did postdoctoral research in bioinformatics at Stanford University from 1993 to 1996. He came to Yale in 1997 as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and since 1999, in the Computer Science Department. He was named an associate professor in 2001, and the following year became co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program. Gerstein has published appreciably in the scientific literature, with >400 publications in total, including a number of them in prominent venues, such as Science, Nature, and Scientific American. His research is focused on bioinformatics, and he is particularly interested in data science & data mining, macromolecular geometry & simulation, human genome annotation & disease genomics, and genomic privacy. 

Antonio studied Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Cadiz and the University Autonoma of Madrid. During undergraduate, he worked with Gines Morata at the CBM in Madrid. Antonio did his PhD with Stephen Cohen at the EMBL (Heidelberg) (1998-2002) and a post-doc with Alex Schier at the Skirball Institute (NYU) and Harvard (2003-2006). Antonio established his laboratory at Yale in 2007 where he investigates the regulatory codes that shape gene expression during embryonic development. He was Director of Graduate Studies (2012-2016) and is currently Chair of the Genetics Department (2017- ).

Initially trained as a chemist, I was introduced to the world of biology through the aquatic route – I studied toxins from deep sea marine cone snails off the coast of India. Whilst deconstructing the venom library I became fascinated by two things - the prowess of mass spectrometric approaches in analysing complex samples and the world of membrane proteins to which these toxins bind, a world which is omnipresent in regulating cellular physiology. 

In 2013 I moved to the University of Oxford as a Fellow of the 1851 Royal Commission. Here my interests converged in the study of membrane protein biology through native mass spectrometry. My work in Oxford led to development of novel native mass spectrometry platforms that, for the first time, showed how specific lipid bindings can act as molecular glue to hold oligomeric assemblies of membrane proteins. 

In the Fall of 2018, I crossed the pond to start my own lab in Yale. Combining native mass spectrometry with an array of other experimental and computational approaches, our lab’s interest is to provide a discovery platform which provides a top down deconstructive view of the various novel transient membrane, and membrane associated multiprotein complexes formed during the progression of different cellular signalling pathways.

Sharon Hammes-Schiffer received her B.A. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, followed by two years at AT&T Bell Labs. She was the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame from 1995-2000 and spent the next twelve years at The Pennsylvania State University as the Eberly Professor of Biotechnology. She became the Swanlund Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2012 and the Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry at Yale University in 2018. Her research centers on the investigation of charge transfer reactions, dynamics, and quantum mechanical effects in chemical, biological, and interfacial processes. Her work encompasses the development of analytical theories and computational methods, as well as applications to a wide range of experimentally relevant systems. She is a Fellow of the APS, ACS, AAAS, and Biophysical Society. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Reviews and on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Part of the Yale faculty since 2000, Prof. Mark Hochstrasser holds appointments in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and the School of Medicine’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program. He earned his B.A. at Rutgers University and his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has earned numerous honors for his scientific contributions, including a Young Investigator Award from the Cancer Research Foundation and designation as a Searle Scholar and a Fletcher Scholar.

Prof. Hochstrasser holds two patents related to this work, which has been published in numerous scientific and medical journals, including Nature, the Journal of Cell Biology, Cell, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Genetics and Nature Cell Biology.

A member of the editorial board/virtual faculty of the Targeted Proteins Database and the journal Cell, Hochstrasser has served on several National Institutes of Health study sections. He is a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Microbiology.

My doctoral research at the University of Chicago with Chip Ferguson demonstrated the conservation of dorsal-ventral patterning mechanisms between insects and vertebrates, identified noggin as a BMP inhibitor and originated concept of facilitated morphogen diffusion. I was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with Nobel Laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. As a postdoc, I discovered the zebrafish segmentation clock, a genetic mechanism that leads to vertebral defects such as scoliosis when perturbed in humans. My lab at Yale studies systems developmental biology, biophysics and biomechanics of vertebral column development in zebrafish. We combine in vivo biophysics, embryology, genetics, live imaging and systems level data analysis and computer modeling to study pattern formation and morphogenesis. Our experimental approach is driven by the idea that quantitative in vivo analysis will lead to fundamental insights into the emergence of biological organization from the collective interaction of its constituent parts. My lab’s research has been supported by grants from the NIH, NSF, the American Cancer Society and the March of Dimes.

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.

Horwich received undergraduate and M.D. degrees from Brown University, trained in Pediatrics at Yale, was then a postdoctoral fellow first at Salk Institute in the Tumor Virology Laboratory, and then in Genetics at Yale, then joined the Yale faculty. His work was initially involved with protein import into mitochondria and resulted in discovery of a "folding machine" inside mitochondria, Hsp60. He has used genetic, biochemical, and biophysical tools to study the mechanism of action of these ring shaped so-called chaperonin machines that provide essential assistance to protein folding in many cellular compartments. More recently he has focused on neurodegenerative disease as caused by protein misfolding, seeking to understand how misfolded SOD1 enzyme in the cytosol of motor neurons leads to one form of ALS. His lab is modeling mutant SOD1-linked ALS in mice transgenic for a mutant SOD1-YFP, the YFP moiety offering a fluorescent reporter of the mutant protein and “tag” for biochemical studies. The transgenic mutant strain presents YFP fluorescent aggregates in motor neurons by the time of weaning, develops muscle weakness, and paralyzes by 6 months of age. By contrast, a wtSOD1-YFP transgenic strain with the same amount of total SOD1-YFP protein in spinal cord remains asymptomatic even after two years, and the cord remains free of aggregates. The nature of injury to the motor system of the mutant mice is under study, particularly at the level of lower motor neurons, examining their dendritic arbors, cell bodies, axons, and neuromuscular junctions, using both morphologic and electrophysiologic approaches. What is the most immediate target of the misfolded protein, and at what level in the motor system? Notably, endogenous molecular chaperones, Hsc70 and Hsp110, associate with the misfolded protein – they are obviously not able to fully protect the system. Can their overexpression alter the progression of motor dysfunction?

Jonathon (Joe) Howard is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and a Professor of Physics at Yale University. He is best known for his research on motor proteins and the cytoskeleton, and the development of techniques for observing and manipulating individual biological molecules. Brought up in Australia, where he studied at the Australian National University, he has had a distinguished career in the United States—he was a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle—and in Germany, where he played a key role, as Director, in establishing the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, one of the most successful research institutes in Europe. In 2013 he returned to the United States where he enjoys teaching, writing and new research projects on cell motility and neuronal morphology.

Lilian Kabeche, Ph.D. joined the Yale faculty in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and is part of the Cancer Biology Institute. Dr. Kabeche attended the University of Miami, where she majored in Microbiology and Immunology (B.S. 2007). She then did her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Dartmouth College in Dr. Duane Compton’s lab, where she studied the mechanism by which kinetochore-microtubules are regulated in mitosis to promote proper chromosome segregation. She went on to do her post-doctoral work in Dr. Lee Zou’s lab, at Mass General Hospital, Harvard University, where she identified a novel role for the DNA damage repair kinase, ATR, in mitosis. Her current work uses a combination of cell biology, biochemistry and microscopy to investigate the non-canonical roles of the DNA damage repair pathway and to further understand the role of ATR in promoting genome stability

After obtaining his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Louisville, KY (where he studied thanks to a swimming scholarship) Dr. Karatekin went on to study soft matter physics and chemistry at Columbia University with N. J. Turro and B. O'Shaughnessy where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1999. He then gradually moved toward studying dynamics of lipid membranes, first during his post-doctoral stay at the Curie Institute (with F. Brochard-Wyart), and later as research faculty at the Laboratoire de Dynamique Membranaire (CNRS FRE 3146), both in Paris, France.

Thanks to a long-term leave from the CNRS, he was a visiting research scientist in the laboratory of Dr. J. E. Rothman in Cell Biology at Yale during 2008-2011. He joined the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology as an assistant professor in 2012.

1986 BS, Biology, University of Washington
1986 BS, Math, University of Washington
1992 PhD, Biochemistry, Stanford University
1992-1996 Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT
1996-2001 Assistant Professor, Yale University
2001- Associate Professor, Yale University

Anthony J. Koleske is an expert in understanding the biochemical mechanisms that control changes in cell shape and movement. After receiving a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Koleske performed his Ph.D. studies with Dr. Richard Young at the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his Ph.D. thesis, Dr. Koleske discovered the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme, an important advancement in understanding how gene transcription is turned on. Dr. Koleske went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baltimore at M.I.T., where he began his work studying cellular functions of Abl family kinases, which his laboratory has shown are essential regulators of the cytoskeleton in diverse cell types. Dr. Koleske joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 1998, where he currently is Professor and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neurobiology. Dr. Koleske is the recipient of numerous awards including a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship, Special Fellowship and Scholar Awards from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, and an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association.He has served widely on review panels, including terms as Chair of the Basic Science Study Section for the American Heart Association and the Neurodifferentiation, Plasticity, Repair, and Rhythmicity Study Section of the NIH. He currently directs the combined Ph.D. programs in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Yale, the China Scholarship Council-Yale World Scholars Program, and co-directs (with Mike Nitabach) the Medical Research Scholars Program at Yale. He is married to Ruth Koleske and is father to twins Ben and Emily.

Mark Lemmon, PhD was appointed the Co-Director of the Cancer Biology Institute and the David A. Sackler Professor of Pharmacology in 2015. Dr. Lemmon returns to Yale, where he completed his PhD in 1993, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. At UPenn, he was the George W. Raiziss Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics as well as Chair of the department and an Investigator at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute. Dr. Lemmon’s research focuses on the signaling pathways of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), which, when mutated cause cancers and other diseases.

The Eugene Higgins Professor of Cell Biology, Professor of Genetics, of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, and of Dermatology, Founding Director of Yale Stem Cell Center. Dr. Lin’s work is focused on the self-renewing mechanism of stem cells, using Drosophila germline stem cells, mouse germline stem cells, mouse  embryonic stem cells, Hydra, and planarian stem cells as models.  He also studies germline development and stem cell-related cancers. 

 Dr. Lin received his B.S. degree from Fudan University (1982), and his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University (1990). Following his postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he joined the faculty of Duke University Medical School in 1994, where he rose to the rank of Full Professor.  He founded and directed the Duke Stem Cell Research Program (2005-2006), and moved to Yale in 2006 to establish and direct the Yale Stem Cell Center, building it from just two labs in 2006 to currently one of the largest stem cell research organizations in the world with 97 member labs.  In 2014, with Yale's support, he became the Founding Dean (Adjunct) of School of Life Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University in China, and has rapidly established a world-class faculty and educational programs in the School.

 Dr. Lin has made key contributions to the demonstration of stem cell asymmetric division and the proof of the stem cell niche theory.  He discovered the Argonaute/Piwi gene family and elucidated their essential function in stem cell self-renewal and germline development. He is also a discoverer of a novel class of non-coding small RNAs called PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), a discovery hailed by the Science Magazine as one of the Ten Scientific Breakthroughs in 2006.  More recently, he proposed and demonstrated the crucial roles of the Piwi-piRNA pathway in epigenetic programming and in post-transcriptional regulation of mRNA and lncRNA.

Dr. Lin has provided numerous services to the scientific community and beyond. His past services included the Treasurer and Member of Executive committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR, 2013-2016), Chair of the ISSCR Finance Committee (2013-2016), of the ISSCR Publications Committee (2009-2012), and of the 2011 Annual Meeting Program Committee (2010-2011).  He also served on other ISSCR committees, the NIH study sections (1998-2005, 2007, 2012, 2014), the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Selection Committee (2009), the External Advisory Board of the Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium, NHLBI, NIH (2010-2012), the Board of Directors of the Society of Chinese Biological Investigators (2002-2008), the Council of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (2008-2011), the Council of Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (2013-2016), the Advisory Council of RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Japan (2007-2015), the Scientific Advisory Board of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (2011-2015), National Key Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (2011-2014), and the Council of Shantou University (2010-2015).  He was a co-founder and Core Member of the Connecticut State Government Life Sciences Advisory Group (2011-2012).

Currently, he serves on the Board of Directors of the ISSCR (2009-), the Medical Advisory Board of New York Stem Cell Foundation (2009-), the NIH CMIR Study section (2019-), and is a Visiting Chair Professor of Tsinghua University (2002-).

Dr. Lin has served on Editorial Boards of Stem Cells (2005-2008), Biology of Reproduction (2009-2010), Journal of Cell Biology (2009-2014), Current Opinion in Cell Biology (2009-2014), Cell Research (2010-), Cell Stem Cells (2007-), StemBook (2007-), Stem Cell Reports (2013-), National Science Review (2013-), and Science China (2013-).  He was a Featured Editor of Nature Reports Stem Cells (2009), and led the establishment of the ISSCR journal Stem Cell Reports (2010-2012).

 Dr. Lin received many awards and honors, including the Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship for Medical Research (1990), American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Research Award (1996), the March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Scholar Research Award (1996), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1996), the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Award (2007, 2011, 2015), the American Society of Andrology Lecturer Award (2008), the Laura Hartenbaum Breast Cancer Foundation’s Legacy for Hope Award (2009), the Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar Award (2010), the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (2010), the NIH MERIT Award (2012), the Ray Wu Award (the highest honor by the Chinese Biological Investigators Society; 2013), and the Society for the Study of Reproduction Research Award (2015). He is a Member of US National Academy of Sciences (2018-), a Member of American academy of Arts and Sciences (2018-), and an Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2010-).

Elias Lolis received his PhD in 1989 from MIT in Chemistry/Biochemistry studying the three-dimensional structure and mechanism of triosephosphate isomerase. He was a postdoctoral associate at the Laboratory of Medical Biochemistry at Rockefeller University studying the functional interaction between advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and the immune system. He joined the Yale faculty in 1991 as an Assistant Professor focusing on the structure, mechanism, and inhibition of chemokines, macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), and their receptors. He has received a

Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association Faculty Development Award in Basic Pharmacology, the Donaghue Young Investigator Award, and the GlaxoWellcome Award in Drug Discovery.

Dr. Lusk has a long standing interest in fundamental cellular mechanisms of compartmentalization with an emphasis on those that govern the biogenesis of the nuclear envelope and nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). He has been studying the nuclear envelope and nuclear transport since his graduate work at the University of Alberta in Canada and has been trained during his postdoctoral fellowship by Günter Blobel at The Rockefeller University. During this time, he (with collaborators/colleagues) has provided substantial insight into how nuclear transport is regulated and how the NPC is assembled. Moreover, he has helped to develop yeast as a model to study integral membrane proteins that reside at the inner nuclear membrane. While it is generally understood that these proteins are essential factors in gene regulation and genome organization, which is reflected by the discovery of the “nuclear envelopathies”, they remain challenging to study. Dr. Lusk is leveraging his expertise in yeast cell biology and genetics with super-resolution and proteomic approaches to illuminate function at the nuclear periphery.

Nikhil received M.S. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Ph.D in Physics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with Prof. Mark Tuominen. His graduate studies at the cellular level revealed that living cells show high electronic conductivity as well as large electron storage capacity due to extracellular proteins. His post-doctoral studies at the molecular level with Prof. Derek Lovley in the Microbiology department identified the protein architecture responsible for the conductivity.

• M.Sc., University of Madras, India, 2001
• Ph.D., University of Goettingen, Germany, 2005

Wei Mi obtained his PhD degree in structural biology at Peking University, Beijing, China. Fascinated by structures of membrane proteins, he came to the US and received postdoctoral training at Purdue University, the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School (HMS). At HMS, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Maofu Liao and used single particle cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) to determine structures of ATP-binding cassette transporters in lipid bilayer environment. In 2019, Dr Mi joined the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. The focus of his research is to dissect mechanisms of membrane proteins with biochemical and structural approaches.

Dr. Miller’s laboratory studies the mechanisms underlying the switch between latency and lytic replication of two oncogenic herpesviruses, Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus. Current experiments explore how viral and cellular transcription factors that selectively bind to methylated DNA control expression of viral and cellular genes, how cellular gene expression is selectively inhibited while viral gene expression is enhanced, and how viral DNA replication is regulated by cellular proteins. Recent studies focus on a new class of anti-viral agents that inhibit reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus from latency into lytic infection.

• 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

Prof. O'Hern is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Physics, co-founder of the Integrated Graduate Program in Physical and Engineering Biology, and Director of Undergraduate Programs for the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical, and Engineering Sciences. His research employs theoretical and computational methods (e.g. all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations) to tackle a broad range of fundamental questions in soft matter and biological physics. Current projects include the dynamics of protein folding, unfolding, and
aggregation, the binding and self-assembly of proteins, and the structural
and mechanical properties of cells and tissues in the context of collective cell motion and wound healing.

The Paintsil laboratory focuses on increasing our understanding of the host determinants of individual differences in response to antiretroviral therapy; biomarkers and pathogenesis of increasing incidence of cancers in HIV treatment-experienced individuals.

I love exploring the unknown and the thrill and sense of accomplishment that comes with making the unknown familiar. This passion has inspired me to make significant transitions, both conceptually and with methodology, at every stage of my career.  I purposefully choose research projects that serve to improve human health as well as stand to make fundamental discoveries of basic biology and physiology. Moreover, I thoroughly enjoy teaching and mentoring as well as helping kids find the joy in science. As a graduate student with Kate Carroll at the University of Michigan and The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, FL, I studied redox regulation of signal transduction cascades important to cancer. As a postdoctoral fellow with David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, I determined the structure of an important pain receptor, TRPA1 by cryo-EM. In my independent lab, we will take a multidisciplinary approach to understand how TRPA1 is regulated under basal and chronic pain/inflammation conditions and we will take a broader look at molecular changes involved in the transition from acute to chronic pain. 

A graduate of Pomona College, Dr. Thomas D. Pollard, earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He taught at Harvard Medical School 1972-78 and joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as the Bayard Halsted Professor and founding director of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy in 1977. At Johns Hopkins, was the founding director of a graduate program in cellular and molecular medicine and was honored with teaching awards seven times.

He joined the Salk Institute as President in 1996. He has also served as adjunct professor at the University of California at San Diego until he moved to Yale University in 2001. He has had a long affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Pollard was president of both the American Society for Cell Biology and the Biophysical Society, and on behalf of these organizations he was active politically in support of funding for biomedical research.

He chaired the Commission on Life Sciences at the National Research Council 1993-98. Honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, the Rosensteil Medical Research Award from Brandeis University with James Spudich of Stanford University (1996), the Howard T. Ricketts Award from the University of Chicago (2000), the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology (2004) and the Gairdner International Award in Biomedical Sciences (2006).

His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MERIT Award from the National Institute of General Medical Science, a Public Service Award from the Biophysical Society and a Winston Churchill Overseas Fellowship from Churchill College in Cambridge, England. Pollard has authored or coauthored more than 400 scientific papers and scholarly articles on his work.

Anna Marie Pyle is the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Professor of Chemistry at Yale University.She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1997.Dr. Pyle obtained her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Princeton University and received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Columbia University in 1990, where she worked with Professor Jacqueline K. Barton. Dr. Pyle was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado. Dr. Pyle formed her own research group in 1992 in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center.In 2002, she moved to Yale University, where she leads a research group that specializes in structure and function of large RNA molecules and RNA remodeling enzymes.Dr. Pyle teaches the undergraduate Molecular Biology course at Yale and she is Chair of the Building Committee for the new Yale Biology Building.Dr. Pyle is the Chair of the MSFA Study Section at the NIH, and previously served as a permanent member on the MSFE, and MGB Study Sections.At Brookhaven National labs, she serves on the Science and Technology Steering Committee and on Beamline Advisory Teams at the NSLSII light source.Dr. Pyle is the Co-Editor of Methods in Enzymology and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Molecular Biology.Dr. Pyle is the author of over 160 publications and has mentored more than 40 graduate students and postdocs.The Pyle laboratory uses a diverse set of biochemical techniques, including crystallography and enzymology, to understand the structural complexity of large RNA molecules. She pioneered the study of RNA helicase enzymes and other RNA-stimulated ATPases that serve as translocases, RNA remodeling enzymes and signaling enzymes in the cell.Her experimental work is complemented by efforts to develop new computational tools for modeling, analyzing and predicting RNA structure.

PhD in chemistry, under the direction of William N. Lipscomb. Post-doc under the direction of Stephen C. Harrison, Harvard University (1995-2001). Faculty at Yale since 2001.

Professor James Rothman, the Sterling Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University, is one of the world's most distinguished biochemists and cell biologists. He is Chairman of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology and is the Director and founder of the Nanobiology Institute on Yale’s new West Campus. Rothman graduated from Yale College (1971) where he studied physics. He received his Ph.D. degree in biological chemistry from Harvard (1976) and was a student at Harvard Medical School from 1971 to 1973. From 1976 to 1978, he completed a fellowship in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1988, he was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University. Dr. Rothman was the E.R. Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University (1988-1991). He founded and chaired the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (1991-2004), where he held the Paul A. Marks Chair and served as Vice-Chairman of Sloan-Kettering. Prior to coming to Yale in 2008, Dr. Rothman was the Wu Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, and Director of Columbia University’s Sulzberger Genome Center.

Professor Rothman discovered key molecular machinery responsible for transfer of materials among compartments within cells, providing the conceptual framework for understanding such diverse and important processes as the release of insulin into the blood, communication between nerve cells in the brain, and the entry of viruses to infect cells. Numerous kinds of tiny membrane-enveloped vesicles ferry packets of enclosed cargo. Each type of vesicle must deliver its specialized cargo to the correct destination among the maze of distinct compartments that populate the cytoplasm of a complex animal cell. The delivery process, termed membrane fusion, is fundamental for physiology and medicine, as pathology in this process can cause metabolic, neuropsychiatric and other diseases. Rothman reconstituted vesicle budding and fusion in a cell-free system (1984) and discovered the complex of SNARE proteins (1993) which mediates membrane fusion and affords it specificity. He also uncovered the GTPase-switch mechanism which controls coated vesicle budding in the cell (1991).

Rothman has also contributed to other fields. Together with Gero Miesenbock, he showed how patterns of synaptic activity in neural networks could be recorded optically using encoded synapto-pHlourins (1998). He discovered that hsp70’s are ATPases (1986) and peptide binding proteins (1989), thereby revealing how these molecular chaperones cycle on and off proteins to control their folding/unfolding. On theoretical grounds, he proposed (1981) that the role of the Golgi is to iteratively purify proteins, using its cisternae like plates in a distillation tower, an idea now implicit in all models of Golgi dynamics; and he provided the first evidence of sequential processing and vectorial transport across the stack (1981-1985). Rothman’s current research concerns the biophysics of membrane fusion and its regulation in exocytosis; the dynamics of the Golgi apparatus at super-resolution; and the use of bio-inspired design in nanotechnology.

Dr. Rothman has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his work on vesicle trafficking and membrane fusion, including the King Faisal International Prize for Science (1996), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1996), the Lounsbery Award of the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the Heineken Foundation Prize of the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (2000), the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize of Columbia University (2002), the Lasker Basic Science Award (2002), the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2010), the Massry Prize (2010),  the EB. Wilson Medal (2010) and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2013). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993) and its Institute of Medicine (1995), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994).

Professor Rudnick is a graduate of Antioch College, where he received a B.S. in Chemistry in 1968. He performed graduate studies in the enzymology of amino acid racemases in the laboratory of Robert H. Abeles in the Graduate Department of Biochemistry at Brandeis University, receiving a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1974. His graduate studies led to an understanding of the structure and mechanism of proline racemase that was confirmed by the crystal structure of a homologous protein in 2006. From 1973-1975, Professor Rudnick performed postdoctoral research on lactose permease with H. Ronald Kaback at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. This work provided a greater understanding of binding and transport reactions using photoaffinity reagents and substrate analogs. In 1975, he left Roche to become an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1980 and Professor in 1991.

Professor Rudnick’s research at Yale has focused on the mechanism and structure of mammalian serotonin transporter (SERT). He developed a system of platelet plasma membrane vesicles with which to study the bioenergetics and mechanism of transport. These studies provided an understanding of the coupling of ion gradients to serotonin accumulation and also identified SERT as the molecular target for the antidepressant imipramine and the psychostimulant MDMA (ecstasy).

Beginning in the 1990s, Professor Rudnick’s laboratory has been studying the molecular characteristics of SERT and other neurotransmitter transporters expressed in cultured cells. These studies led to the identification of the serotonin binding site in SERT and of regions in the protein undergoing conformational changes during transport. The availability of a crystal structure for a homologous bacterial transporter in 2005 allowed Professor Rudnick and his colleagues to use the conformational changes to propose a conformational mechanism of transport that is gaining wide acceptance. Because SERT is structurally related to many other transporters, the proposed mechanism is likely to apply to transporters functioning in many diverse biological systems.

In addition to these mechanistic studies, Professor Rudnick’s laboratory has been investigating a spontaneously occurring SERT mutant associated with several psychiatric disorders. The mutation apparently inhibits removal of a phosphate group added to SERT by cGMP-dependent protein kinase. The mechanism by which this phosphate increases SERT activity is an active area of investigation.

Dr. Schatz has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms that assemble and diversify antigen receptor genes that encode antibodies and T cell receptors.  He is best known for the discovery of RAG1 and RAG2, subsequent biochemical insights into RAG function and evolutionary origins, and the discovery of two distinct levels of regulation of somatic hypermutation.

Schatz has co-authored over 160 articles, many in prestigious journals, and has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship, the Snow Prize (Yale University's top award to a graduating senior), the National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellows Award, the American Association of Immunologists-BD Biosciences Investigator Award, and election to the National Academy of Sciences. He has been active as an editor and reviewer, serving as Co-Editor of the journal Immunity, as a member of the editorial board of a number of journals, and as a member and Chair of the NIH study section Cellular and Molecular Immunology-A.  Schatz has also been very interested in graduate education, serving for many years as the Director of Graduate Studies and Graduate Admissions for Immunobiology and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) Program.  He remains strongly committed to enhancing predoctoral and postdoctoral training programs in his current role as Chair of the Department of Immunobiology.

Schatz received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1980, and a M.A. degree in Philosophy and Politics from Oxford University in 1982. His Ph.D. degree (1990) and postdoctoral training were done with Dr. David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

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.

Fred Sigworth studied applied physics at Caltech and was a graduate student at Yale, working in the neuroscience laboratory of Charles F. Stevens. He received the PhD in physiology from Yale in 1979 and was a postdoc in the laboratory of Erwin Neher in Göttingen, Germany where he was a co-developer of patch-clamp techniques for single-channel electrophysiology. He returned to Yale as a faculty member at Yale in 1984. His current research is in the structural biology of ion-channel proteins, making use of novel cryo-EM methods. "How do I see the scientific enterprise? An old book puts it this way: one generation commends God's works to another. It is a great privilege to unravel the workings of ion channels, and to pass on the excitement about these molecular machines to students, colleagues and anyone else who will listen!"

Matt grew up in Ann Arbor, MI and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. He commuted between Berkeley and UCSF, working with Kevan Shokat developing chemical methods to make synthetic chromatin substrates to study the biochemistry of epigenetics. He continued this work as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation post doctoral fellow in Robert Kingston's laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where his interests expanded to include large non-coding RNAs and their impact on chromatin. He is part of the Chemical Biology Institute on Yale's West Campus, and The Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, where his group's research focuses on developing new chemical and biochemical means of investigating the regulatory roles of non-coding transcription including long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and their influence on chromatin biology.

My scientific career has largely focused on developing an atomic-level understanding of a model cytoskeletal system, the kinesin molecular motor which transports cargo along microtubules. While my Ph.D. work emphasized X-ray crystallography and EPR spin-labeling techniques as applied to the kinesin system, my more recent work has turned towards advancing cryo-electron microscopy techniques to the point where atomic-level features can be obtained for systems such as cytoskeletal filaments. These efforts led to my recent synthesis, using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and X-ray crystallography information, of an atomic-level model for kinesin’s ATP-sensing machinery in its active form, which is only assumed following microtubule attachment. This discovery led to a simple and intuitive “seesaw” mechanism describing how ATP binding leads to force generation in the microtubule-attached motor. My laboratory's research interests are rapidly expanding to include numerous other filament-related molecular machines, such the myosin molecular motor that powers muscle movement, and diverse protein machinery involved in DNA repair and splicing.

Satinder was born in Boston, MA and moved, as a teenager, to Minneapolis, MN, with her family. She received her doctoral degree in Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, supported by an HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship. She has had a long-standing interest in the molecular mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disease, particularly in the role that the biogenic amines play. As a postdoctoral fellow, she combined her knowledge of neuropsychopharmacology and enzymology with X-ray crystallography to develop molecular models of transport and inhibition for LeuT, a bacterial orthologue of neurotransmitter sodium symporters (NSS). At Yale, Satinder has been concentrating on eukaryotic NSS members, specifically those that transport the biogenic amines serotonin (SERT) and dopamine (DAT).

As a college student in the 1960s, Joan Steitz never imagined herself as a top-flight scientist. Certainly, she was fascinated by science. She even assisted senior scientists in laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was befriended by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. But when it came time to choose a career path, she had never seen a female professor or head of lab. So, she never aspired to such goals.

Today, Prof. Joan Steitz is one of leading scientists in her field. Steitz is best known for her pioneering work in RNA. She and her student Michael Lerner discovered and defined the function of small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA—the earliest product of DNA transcription—and was the first to learn that these cellular complexes (snRNPs) play a key role in processing messenger RNA by excising noncoding regions and splicing together the resulting segments. Her breakthroughs into the previously mysterious splicing process have clarified the science behind the formation of proteins and other biological processes, including the intricate changes that occur as the immune system and brain develop. Steitz earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1967. After completing postdoctoral work in Cambridge, England, she joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale as an assistant professor and later became an associate and full professor, as well as chair of the department.

Professor Strobel's laboratory investigates the structural and mechanistic basis of RNA enzymes, with particular attention to two systems: self-splicing introns and peptide bond formation by the ribosome. The overriding question being addressed is: How does RNA, which is composed of building blocks best suited for a role in the storage of genetic information, catalyze biologically essential chemical reactions? To explore this question, they use chemical, biochemical, and biophysical methods ranging from organic synthesis to X-ray crystallography. These complementary approaches provide high-resolution biochemical and structural information about the RNAs under investigation. Their results have revealed that RNA uses catalytic strategies that are strikingly similar to those of proteins, the more adept and more common catalyst within cells. This includes catalysis promoted by active-site metal ions and substrate-assisted catalysis involving chemical groups on the reaction substrates.

Dr. Xiaolei Su obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University. He worked on the regulation of microtubule dynamics by molecular motors under the mentorship of David Pellman. Then he joined Ron Vale's Lab at UCSF as a postdoc fellow. His work led to the discovery that phase separation of membrane-bound proteins can promote T cell activation. As an assistant professor at Yale, Dr. Su is interested in exploring membrane remodeling and membrane-proximal signal transduction during immune responses. Part of the work involves developing new chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) for improved cancer immunotherapy.   

I did my PhD in microbiology and molecular biology in The University of Queensland, Australia. During my PhD I worked and published on a variety of projects including developing a new lentiviral vector based on JDV (Jembrana Disease Virus), translational regulation in HCV by small RNA-binding molecules and the viral core protein, and RNA-protein interactions in positive strand RNA viruses. During this time I was also involved in cloning the Australian isolate of HCV with Dr Eric Gowans. My findings in these projects were published in a variety of journal including PNAS, Hepatology, and Journal of Molecular Biology.My next stop was a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Harry Noller at the RNA Center in UCSC where I delved deeper into the RNA world and studied the helicase activity of the ribosome during translation. Our work was well received and published in Cell.

I started my Internal Medicine residency at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 2003. During the last year of my residency I took part in a research project led by Dr Sands on the role of TIMP-1 in reactive airway disease. Our work was published in Clinical Immunology. I was then recruited to the Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship at Yale in 2007, and worked with Dr J Elias to set up a platform for analyzing the role of microRNAs in the lung disease using the transgenic models that have been developed in his lab. I started this work on an inducible, lung-specific, VEGF transgenic model and within the first year of the project found a microRNA that was regulated by VEGF and mediated the effects of this cytokine in the lung. Based on these findings we filed a patent on the diagnsostic and therapeutic use of miR-1 in lung disease. I received a K99/R00 award in the third year of my clinical fellowship for my work on this project. I was directly recruited as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Yale Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Section at the end of my fellowship.

Since starting my tenure track position in 2010 I have been awarded the AAP (American Association of Physicians) Junior Investigator Award for my work on microRNAs in the lung and have given invited presentations at various international conferences. Our work on the role of VEGF-miR-1 axis in lung Th2 inflammation was published in Journal of Experimental Medicine. I successfully transitioned to the R00 (Independent investigator) phase of my NIH grant in 2013. I have recruited and worked with two postdoctoral fellows and three Associate Research Scientists over the last three years. My research currently focuses on the role of vascular non-coding RNAs in Th2 inflammation, lung injury and cancer.

Josien van Wolfswinkel received her M.Sc. in Cell Biology from Utrecht University, Netherlands. For her graduate research she worked in the laboratories of Ronald Plasterk, Albert Heck, and Rene Ketting at Utrecht University and the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology to study the molecular mechanism of RNA interference in the nematode C. elegans. She did her postdoctoral research in the lab of Peter Reddien at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research / MIT, working on the RNA biology of stem cells using the flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea as a model system. She now continues this work in her own lab in the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology.

Dr. Siyuan (Steven) Wang obtained his B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 2011. His Ph.D. dissertation presented a series of discoveries regarding the physical properties, organization, and dynamics of the bacterial cytoskeleton and cell wall. The findings provided a quantitative, spatiotemporal description of bacterial cell growth at the molecular level, and led to mechanistic explanations of important cellular behaviors, e.g., the maintenance of cell shape. Besides the scientific discoveries, the projects involved the development of several novel biophysical experimental approaches and theoretical frameworks, which could be broadly applied to other organisms. Dr. Wang’s graduate work won the “2011 American Physical Society Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Biological Physics”, annually awarded to one graduate student in the US.

During his postdoctoral training at Harvard University, Dr. Wang set out to study another large, complex biopolymer with a more direct relationship to human health – mammalian chromatin. The spatial organization of chromatin in the nucleus is of critical importance to many essential genomic functions, from the regulation of gene expression to the replication of the genome. Despite its significance, relatively little is known about the three-dimensional (3D) organization of the chromatin beyond the length scale of the nucleosomes, in large part due to the lack of tools that allow direct visualization and comprehensive mapping of the 3D organization of chromatin in individual chromosomes. To address this need, Dr. Wang’s main postdoctoral work published in Science introduced a novel multiplexed DNA fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) technique that enables direct spatial tracing of numerous genomic regions in individual chromosomes in single cells. As the first application of this technique, he traced the spatial organization of the recently discovered topologically associating domains, also termed contact domains, in individual chromosomes in interphase human cells, and revealed a series of unexpected structural features. Additionally in two side projects, he developed an RNA-aptamer-based two-color CRISPR labeling system, and a new photoactivatable fluorescent protein that has since been adopted by more than 100 research labs around the world for its ideal photo-switching properties and minimal labeling artifacts in single-molecule-based super-resolution microscopy. Dr. Wang’s postdoctoral study was supported by a Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship, and was awarded with the 2016 International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics (one recipient per year worldwide), and the 2017 Harvard Chinese Life Sciences Distinguished Research Award.

Dr. Xiong’s research focuses on structural and biochemical studies of HIV suppression by host antiviral factors and viral immune evasion. Dr. Xiong also investigates cellular DNA repair pathways.

Elsa Yan was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995. Working with Kenneth Eisenthal on nonlinear optics and surface sciences, she obtained her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2000. From 2000-2004, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Richard Mathies's lab at UC Berkeley and a visiting fellow in Thomas Sakmar's lab at the Rockefeller University. She combined Raman spectroscopy with techniques in molecular biology to understand the molecular mechanism of signal transduction in the G-protein coupled receptor rhodopsin. In 2004, she joined The Rockefeller University, where she continued to develop methods in expression and purification of membrane proteins. In 2007, Elsa became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Yale. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012 and Full Professor in 2014.

Jing Yan is currently an Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute (Qbio) at Yale. Originally from Shanghai, China, he obtained his B.S. degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University in China, with extensive undergraduate research experience in organic synthesis. In 2009, he switched to the field of soft matter physics and pursued Ph.D. degree in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Working with Steve Granick, he developed novel reconfigurable, active colloidal materials during his Ph.D.

In 2014, he stumbled into microbiology at Princeton as a joint postdoctoral researcher in the department of Molecular Biology and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Working with Bonnie Bassler, Howard Stone, and Ned Wingreen, he studied bacterial biofilms with an interdisciplinary approach. With new imaging techniques, he discovered the spontaneous cellular ordering inside V. cholerae biofilms that leads to the formation of tenacious biofilm clusters. His study on the biofilm material properties leads to innovative methods to remove harmful biofilms. He received the Career Award at the Scientific Interface from Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2016.

Shaul got his BSc and MSc from Paris VII University in France, and his PhD from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he studied EGFR signaling with Benny Shilo. As a postdoc with Kang Shen at Stanford he developed imaging tools that enable using forward genetic approaches to study neuronal microtubules and axonal transport in live animals with single cell resolution.

The lab is interested in neuronal cell biology. We want to understand how the architecture of the neuronal cytoskeleton is established and how it supports polarized traffic in order to maintain structures such as synapses, which are found at a large distance from the cell body, over the lifetime of a neuron.

Dr. Jack (Kai) Zhang obtained his Ph.D at the Institute of Biophysics (IBP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2013 and did his postdoctoral research in Dr. Andrew Carter's lab at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 2014 to 2018. He moved to Yale University in September 2018 and officially started his appointment as an assistant professor at the MB&B department in January 2019.

Dr. Zhang’s research at Yale University focuses on the structural mechanisms of dynein motors and methods development of cryo-electron microscopy.

Dr. Zhang obtained a bachelor's degree in applied physics and a master's degree in theoretical physics in China before he came to the US in 1997. He began to use pipettes as a graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and barely passed his qualifying exams. Fortunately, he seemed to do research well under the supervision of Prof. Donald M. Crothers and got a Ph. D. in 2003. His thesis work is related to the sequence-dependent DNA bending and flexibility. Dr. Zhang then became a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Carlos Bustamante's lab at UC Berkeley. Using optical tweezers, he found that representative chromatin remodeling factors contain DNA translocases and first measured their translocation speed, processivity, and stall force. 

Prof. Zhang has broad interests and skills in measuring the intra- and inter-molecular forces and the forces generated by molecular machines. He tries to use these measurements to better understand the working mechanisms and biological functions of macromolecules. With his collaborators, Prof. Zhang combines high-resolution optical tweezers with single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to simultaneously manipulate and visualize single molecules in real time. As a result, dynamic structures of proteins inaccessible by other experimental methods can be obtained. Prof. Zhang's primary interests are mechanical force in biology and folding dynamics of proteins involved in fundamental biological processes and human diseases, with a focus on SNARE proteins and their regulators essential for intracellular vesicle fusion.