Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics, and Development (MCGD) Track

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.

Dr. Andrew Xiao is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Yale Stem Cell Center. Dr. Xiao’s laboratory focuses on epigenetic regulation in pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotenct stem cells (iPSC). His laboratory has made significant contributions to the understanding of the maintenance of pluripotency, as well as the recent discovery of novel epigenetic mechanisms, i.e., N6-methyl-adenine, in mammalian genomes. Dr. Xiao received his Ph.D degree from Terry Van Dyke’s lab at UNC-Chapel Hill and postdoctoral training from David Allis’ lab at Rockefeller University. Since 2009, Andrew Xiao is a recipient of the NCI Howard Temin Award in Cancer Research (K99/R00) and in 2012, he received the New Scholar Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

Our lab uses multidisciplinary approaches to understand the impact of RNA metabolism in development, health and disease. We are primarily focused in identifying the physiological and pathophysiological roles of RNA modifications and non-coding RNAs at the molecular, cellular and organismal levels. Claudio, a native of Chile, obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in NYC. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University before joining Yale University in 2017.

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. 

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. 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.

Martina Brueckner obtained her BS and MD degrees from the University of Virginia, followed by a Pediatric Residency at the University of Pittsburgh and a Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine. Her clinical and research focus is genetics of congenital heart disease (CHD). The Brueckner laboratory focuses on the cause(s) of a type of congenital heart disease called heterotaxy.

Dr. Brueckner's clinical focus is on patients with genetic causes of congenital heart disease. It has become increasingly apparent that a large portion of cardiovascular disease in children and adolescents has as its underlying etiology a genetic defect. Frequently, patients with a genetically caused cardiovascular defect have involvement of other systems. These patients require care from multiple subspecialists. This multi-specialty care is sometimes difficult to coordinate, and attending many separate clinics can be time consuming for the patients and their families. The Children's Hospital at Yale-New Haven created a unique joint genetics-cardiology clinic that provides comprehensive diagnostic evaluation and follow-up care for patients with genetic-cardiovascular disease. Dr. Brueckner has been a staff cardiologist since completing her fellowship at Yale in 1990.

Michael J. Caplan received his bachelors degree from Harvard University and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1987. He joined Yale's Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology as a faculty member in 1988, and is currently the C.N.H. Long Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Cell Biology.

He has received fellowships from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation for Science and Engineering, and a National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. He has also received the Young Investigator Awards from the American Physiological Society and the American Society of Nephrologists.

His work focuses on understanding the ways in which kidney cells organize and maintain their unique structures. His laboratory also studies the mechanisms responsible for Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease, and is working to identify targets for new therapies.

Sidi Chen joined the Yale Faculty in 2015 as an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Systems Biology Institute, also as a member of the Yale Cancer Center and the Yale Stem Cell Center. Chen earned a PhD in evolutionary genetics from The University of Chicago with an award-winning dissertation with Dr. Manyuan Long. After graduation he performed postdoctoral studies at MIT under the mentorship of Dr. Phil Sharp, and also the Broad Institute working with Dr. Feng Zhang. His research focuses on providing a global understanding of biological systems. Chen developed and applied genome editing and high-throughput screening technologies, precision CRISPR-based in vivo models of cancer, global mapping of functional drivers of cancer oncogenesis and metastasis. More recently, he developed novel systems that enable rapid identification of novel immunotherapy targets and new modalities of cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Chen received a number of national and international awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow, Dale Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists, AACR NextGen Award for Transformative Cancer Research, TMKF Innovative/Translation Cancer Research Award, BCA Exceptional Research Grant Award, MRA Young Investigator Award, V Scholar, Bohmfalk Scholar, Ludwig Family Foundation Award, St. Baldrick’s Foundation Award, CRI Clinic & Laboratory Integration Program (CLIP), MIT TechReview Regional 35 Innovators, and Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award.

Kei-Hoi Cheung, PhD has distinguished himself as a researcher and educator in the field of Biomedical Informatics with a growing national and international reputation. A particular strength is Dr. Cheung’s ability to forge strong, productive collaborations with a range of different bioscience researchers at Yale, in which his contributions include the development of complex databases and informatics tools that are critical for the research projects being performed. In the context of these collaborations, Dr. Cheung is simultaneously able to carry out his own informatics research on issues involved in robust interoperation and integration of databases and tools in the biosciences. In addition to giving talks and presentations at national and international meetings, he has published his own informatics research in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, as well as contributing to publications focused on his collaborators’ research. He has established a broad base of collaborations with faculty in different departments at Yale, including Genetics, Pathology, Computer Science, Biostatistics, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and Biology. He was Director of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core of the NIDA Proteomics Center, focused on collaborative informatics support of neuroproteomics research at Yale. In addition to being a collaborator on numerous grants, Dr. Cheung has been PI on several federal grants (NIH and NSF). Dr. Cheung is also a core faculty member of Yale's Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

Dr. Cheung’ s research interests include the semantic web using the next generation of web technologies to integrate life science data and tools, and is co-editor of two books for Springer-Verlag titled: “Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences” and “Semantic e-Science”, respectively. Dr. Cheung also led the BioRDF task force (2008-2010) of the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group that is an international community engaging in the creative use of Semantic Web in biomedicine. In addition, Dr. Cheung has recently embarked on natural language processing (NLP) projects in annotating, extracting and retrieving information from clinical text as part of the Veteran Administration (VA) electronic medical records. In summary, Dr. Cheung’s biomedical informatics expertise in database/semantic web research and NLP tool development, his national and international recognition as a researcher/educator, and his research contributions in these areas exemplify the attributes of a prominent researcher in biomedical informatics.

Keith Choate M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-scientist who employs tools of human genetics to understand fundamental mechanisms of disease. In clinical practice, he specializes in complex cases unresponsive to standard therapies. Dr. Choate is an attending physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Yale Primary Care Center, and Yale Dermatology Associates. He is the co-chief of Dermatology at the Saint Raphael's Campus of Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Dr. Choate provides care for patients with all dermatologic conditions and he has special interest in:

• atopic dermatitis (eczema)
• autoimmune blistering disorders including pemphigus and bullous pemphigoid
• inflammatory disorders such as lichen planus, pityriasis rubra pilaris, and severe acne
• genetic disorders including disorders of keratinization, and cutaneous mosaic disorders
• psoriasis
• skin cancer

Dr. Choate uses a wide variety of treatment modalities including phototherapy, systemic immunosuppressive agents, retinoids, and newer disease-targeted biologic agents to treat psoraisis and atopic dermatitis (eczema).

Patients are seen in consultation after referral by a dermatologist or primary care physician, typically after first-line therapies have failed.

In his research, Dr. Choate employs next generation sequencing technologies to identify mutations causing genetic skin diseases and his group studies the function of identified genes in normal and disease states. Dr. Choate has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and presents his work at national and international meetings. He is a member of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board for the Foundation for Ichthyosis and Related Skin types.  His laboratory is funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and of Musculoskelatal and Skin Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Choate mentors undergraduate, graduate, and medical students in his laboratory, teaches at Yale Medical School, and trains resident physicians and fellows.

Jean-Ju L. Chung received her bachelors and masters degree from Seoul National University, Korea and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2007. She was a postdoctoral fellow with David E. Clapham in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. She joined Yale's Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology as a faculty member in September, 2015.

Her research is devoted to investigating cellular signaling via the membrane receptors and ion channels, with a current emphasis on mature spermatozoan motility and fertilization capacity. She has focused her efforts on the primary calcium channel of spermatozoa, CatSper, and has defined its subunits, its distribution in spermatozoa, its function in capacitation, and its effects on fertility. The Chung laboratory applies novel technologies to sperm biology and reproductive research including super-resolution imaging methods, and is continuing to study physiologically relevant molecular changes during mammalian fertilization.

Daniel Colón-Ramos was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He completed his B.A. at Harvard University, his PhD in the lab of Dr. Sally Kornbluth at Duke University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Kang Shen at Stanford University. The Colón-Ramos lab is interested in how synapses are precisely assembled to build the neuronal architecture that underlies behavior. To address this, they developed tools in the thermotaxis circuit of C. elegans. Their system enables unbiased genetic screens to identify novel pathways that instruct synaptogenesis in vivo, and single-cell manipulation of these pathways to understand how they influence behavior. As mechanisms underlying synapse structure and function are conserved, the research program seeks to enhance our understanding of synaptic cell biology in higher organisms, which may be important for disease.

Chris Cotsapas is a geneticist whose primary interest is in understanding the biological processes underlying diseases of the immune system. He has published several highly cited papers on genome-wide association studies of disease, gene expression genetics and evolutionary biology. For more information please see our lab website.

Chris obtained his BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London in 2000 and his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics from the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 2007.

Dr. Cresswell is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Cell Biology and Dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine.

He received his B.S. degree in chemistry, his M.S. degree in microbiology from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K., and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and immunology from London University. His postdoctoral training was completed at Harvard University with Jack Strominger.

Before assuming his position at Yale, Dr. Cresswell was Chief of the Division of Immunology at Duke University Medical Center. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, U.K., and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine.

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.

A native of Italy, De Camilli studied at the Liceo Manzoni in Milan, earned his M.D. degree from the University of Milano in 1972 and obtained a postgraduate degree in medical endocrinology from the University of Pavia in Italy. He was a postdoctoral fellow (1978-79) with Paul Greengard in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale, and subsequently an assistant professor in the Yale Section of Cell Biology. Following a return of a few years to Milan, he moved back to Yale in the late 1980s, where he is now John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience. He became an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1992. From 1997 to 2000 he served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and since 2005 he is Founding Director of the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. Since 2015, he serves as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience.

The De Camilli lab is interested in the cell biology of neuronal synapses. His studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His research has provided insight into mechanisms of membrane fission and has revealed ways through which membrane-associated proteins can generate, sense and stabilize lipid bilayer curvature. His discovery and characterization of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of endocytosis have broad implications in the fields of phospholipid signaling and of membrane traffic. Building on this work, he has recently become interested in the role of membrane contact sites in the control of the homeostasis of bilayer lipids. His studies of synapses have also contributed to the elucidation of pathogenetic mechanisms of human diseases. 

Dr. DiGiovanna is a native of Long Island, NY, who graduated from Cornell University in 1984 with a B.A. and a double major in the fields of biochemistry and music. He attended Yale University from 1984 through 1990 where he was earned the MD and PhD degrees, with his PhD in Pharmacology. He continued his post-graduate training at Yale, performing internship and residency in Internal Medicine, a research post-doctoral fellowship, and a clinical fellowship in Medical Oncology. He is currently an attending physician in Medical Oncology and Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Pharmacology at Yale University. His clinical specialty is breast cancer and he conducts both clinical and laboratory-based research. His translational laboratory research focuses on signal transduction in breast cancer. He also has had many leadership roles in education at the Yale School of Medicine, including current roles as Co-Director of the Pre-Clerkship Curriculum, Pharmacology Thread Leader, and Co-Leader of the Genes & Development Master Course.

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.

My lab studies animal evolution, with a particular focus on better understanding our most distant animal relatives and the earliest events in the animal tree of life. Our research includes field work to collect poorly known animals, often by SCUBA diving and sometimes with remotely operated underwater vehicles. Lab bench work includes studies of anatomy and genome function. Much of my work is computational- we develop methods and tools for analyzing evolutionary relationships and using those relationships to provide an integrated perspective on genomic and anatomical evolution. I coauthored the book Practical Computing for Biologists to help more biologists become comfortable with computational methods. In addition to his studies of broad patterns of diversity across distantly related animals, my lab also focuses on siphonophores, a group of about 185 species of open-ocean animals that include the Portuguese Man of War. We address basic questions about their structure, growth, diversity, and evolution. I did my undergraduate studies at Stanford University, my graduate studies were with Günter Wagner at Yale, and postdoc studies with Mark Martindale at the University of Hawaii.

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.

Dr. Jorge E. Galán earned his DVM from the National University of La Plata (Argentina) and his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Cornell University. He completed postdoctoral studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and was in the Faculty at SUNY Stony Brook before coming to Yale in 1998. He is currentlythe Lucille B. Markey Professor of Microbiology, Chair of the Departmentof Microbial Pathogenesis and Professor of Cell Biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Galán is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, the Searle Scholar Award, the National Institutes of Health MERIT award in 2000 and 2015, the Hans Sigrist Prize, the Alexander M. Cruickshank Award, and the Robert Koch Prize.  He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and a member of the USA National Academy of Science.  He is a member of several Scientific Advisory Boards and has authored more than 200 publications in the field of bacterial pathogenesis and molecular biology.

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- ).

Radiation oncologist Peter M. Glazer, MD, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Therapeutic Radiology. He has dedicated his career to helping cancer patients receive the highest quality of care available in a supportive environment.

“When patients are undergoing radiotherapy for cancer, it can be a sensitive and challenging time for them and their families,” he says. “Our team does everything possible to keep our patients safe and comfortable throughout treatment.” 

Dr. Glazer makes it his priority to provide patients seeking care at Smilow Cancer Hospital and its Care Centers with the most advanced technologies and evidence-based treatments. “We take great pride in giving our physicians the best tools to treat cancer,” he says.

As a professor of both therapeutic radiology and genetics at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Glazer researches new therapeutic strategies for treating cancer and the role of altered DNA repair in tumor progression. His research was recently recognized by the National Cancer Institute of the NIH with a prestigious Outstanding Investigator Award of $7 million that will support his efforts to develop novel DNA repair inhibitors for cancer therapy.

After completing medical school and internal medicine training at the University of Missouri, Dr. Gorelick trained at Yale in Gastroenterology. After his clinical training, he began basic science training with Dr. James Jamieson at Yale. During that period he described calcium-calmodulin dependent protein kinase II and subsequently worked with Dr. Paul Greengard (Rockefeller University) to examine the enzyme's mechanism of activation, a response critical to neuronal memory.

His later work has focused on the mechanisms of acute pancreatits and how digestive enzymes, such as trypsin, are activated within the pancreas during this disease. Dr. Gorelick sees patients with gastrointestinal diseases at the VAMC in West Haven, CT. He is also the Deputy Director for the Yale physician Scientist program and directs a year-long course for the group that links basic science to clinical disease. He has also been the Director of the Yale Program in Investigative Gastroenterology for over 10 years. His laboratory at the VA studies the molecular mechanisms related to acute pancreatitis with a goal of developing tools that prevent or lessen disease.

Valentina Greco was born in Palermo, Italy and earned her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Palermo, Italy. She earned her PhD with Suzanne Eaton at the EMBL/MPI-CBG, Germany (1998-2002) and her post-doc with Elaine Fuchs at the Rockefeller University (2003-2009). Dr. Greco is currently the Carolyn Slayman Professor of Genetics. She is also secondary faculty in Cell Biology and Dermatology Departments, and a member of the Yale Stem Cell Center and Yale Cancer Center at the Yale School of Medicine (2009-present).

Dr. Gruen received his BS and his MD degrees from Tulane University in New Orleans. He has been at Yale since beginning internship training in pediatrics in 1981, which was followed by subspecialty training in neonatology and research training in molecular genetics with Dr. Sherman Weissman. Dr. Gruen formally joined the faculty at Yale in 1988, splitting his time as a neonatology attending in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Yale-New Haven Hospital and his lab where he initially mapped the gene for hemochromatosis. By 2000, the focus of his lab turned to mapping and identifying the reading disability (dyslexia) gene locus on chromosome 6 (DYX2). His lab was the first to generate high-resolution genetic markers, genetic association maps, and gene expression maps of DYX2. These studies led to the identification of DCDC2, a dyslexia gene that was cited by the journal Science as the 5th top breakthrough of 2005. The lab performed an NIH funded clinical study of DCDC2 and other genes related to reading and language in the ALSPAC birth cohort of 10,000 children and mothers. These studies identified the transcriptional control element called READ1, and READ1 alleles that are detrimental and protective for reading disability and language impairment. Dr. Gruen is the principal investigator for the Yale Genes, Reading and Dyslexia (GRaD) Study, a ground-breaking case-control study of dyslexia in 1,400 Hispanic American and African American children recruited from seven sites across North America. He was the Yale site PI for the NIH Pediatric Imaging NeuroGenetics (PING) Data Resource Study of 1,575 normal children, ages 3-20 years. Most recently, Dr. Gruen started the New Haven Lexinome Project, a new six-year longitudinal study of the genetics of response-to-intervention spanning the entire 2015 and 2016 New Haven Public Schools first grade classes. The goals of the New Haven Lexinome Project are to determine risk for learning disabilities conferred by specific genetic variants for presymptomatic diagnosis, and to determine how genetic variants inform intervention for precision/personal education. In addition to his research, Dr. Gruen continues to attend 8 weeks each year in the NICU at the Children’s Hospital at Yale-New Haven.

Dr. Murat Gunel, Professor of Neurosurgery, assumed the position of chief of Neurovascular Surgery Program in January of 2001. Dr. Gunel is a board certified neurosurgeon and is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He has special interest in treating brain aneurysms and vascular malformations with special emphasis on arterio-venous malformations and cavernous malformations. He also has expertise in occlusive vascular disorders such as carotid disease and gamma knife surgery (radiosurgery).

His laboratory interests parallel his expertise in clinical neurovascular surgery and focus on gene discovery in disorders of the nervous system and its vasculature. Dr. Gunel's lab completed the two largest genome wide association studies (GWAS) aimed at understanding common variants that underlie intracranial aneurysm genetic risk based on the analysis of over 20,000 subjects. In addition, he is interested in the identification of genes important in human brain development through the study of rare, consanguineous families with recessive forms of malformations of cortical development.

A native of Guangzhou, China, Junjie Guo received his B.A. in Biology from Peking University (Beijing). He completed his Ph.D. thesis in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, working with Hongjun Song on neuronal DNA methylation in the adult brain. During his postdoctoral training in David Bartel's laboratory at the Whitehead Institute/MIT,  Guo developed a series of high-throughput computational and experimental methods to investigate circular RNAs and intracellular RNA folding. He joined the Department of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine in Fall 2017. 

The Guo lab is broadly interested in questions at the intersection of RNA biology and neuroscience, with an emphasis on developing and applying new tools to investigate RNA-based gene regulatory mechanisms in the nervous system. Research in the lab aims to understand how these mechanisms may be specialized in the nervous system as well as their roles in neurological diseases.

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.

Marc did his doctoral work with Erik Jorgensen, studying genetics and synaptic transmission. In his postdoc with Mike Bastiani he pioneered the study of axon regeneration in C. elegans and discovered the DLK regeneration pathway.

The Hammarlund lab develops novel ways to study the cell biology of neurons in vivo. We study how neurons prevent degeneration, repair injury, and maintain circuit function. Please visit our web site: hammarlab.org.

Shilpa Hattangadi has an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science undergraduate degree from MIT. Her postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute in Harvey Lodish's lab spurred an interest in applying fundamental molecular biology to intriguing concenpts in red blood cell development. Her initial work on the dynamics of chromatin modifications during erythroid transcription transformed into a focus on erythroid nuclear development. Our laboratory now centers on the dynamics of chromatin during normal terminal erythroid differentiation, specifically chromatin condensation and enucleation, which is specific to mammalian red cell development, as well as the role of certain chromatin modifiers on erythroid nuclear development in diseases such as myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS).

Dr. Higley studied behavioral neuroscience at Cornell University. He then completed his MD and PhD in the MSTP Program and the laboratory of Dr. Diego Contreras at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued his scientific training as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bernardo Sabatini at Harvard Medical School and joined the faculty of the Yale Department of Neuroscience in 2010.

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.

Ellen J. Hoffman, M.D., Ph.D. was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center in July 2015. Ellen is a child psychiatrist, psychiatric geneticist and neurobiologist, and a graduate of the Investigative Medicine PhD Program at Yale, who specializes in the functional analysis of genes in neurodevelopmental disorders. The Hoffman laboratory conducts translational research aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorders and discovering new pharmacological treatments. Ellen's research focuses on investigating the function of genes that are strongly associated with autism to determine how disruption of these genes alters brain development and the neural circuits underlying simple behaviors. The long-term goal of her research is to use this gene-based approach to identify relevant biological pathways and novel pharmacological treatments that target these pathways. Ellen also works clinically as a child psychiatrist and as an attending supervising Yale child psychiatry fellows.

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.

Akiko Iwasaki received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (Canada) in 1998, and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health (USA) (1998-2000). She joined Yale University (USA) as a faculty in 2000, and currently is an Investigator of the HHMI and Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Department of Immunobiology, and of Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology. Akiko Iwasaki’s research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses at the mucosal surfaces. Her laboratory is interested in how innate recognition of viral infections lead to the generation of adaptive immunity, and how adaptive immunity mediates protection against subsequent viral challenge.

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

Samuel G. Katz graduated with a combined B.S./M.S. from Yale University in 1995. He then pursued dual M.D., Ph.D. training in the Health Sciences & Technology (HST) program jointly administered by MIT and Harvard. His Ph.D. thesis with Stuart H. Orkin focused on the transcriptional regulation of hematopoiesis. Sam then completed a residency in pathology and fellowship in hematopathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He performed his post-doctoral studies on apoptosis with Loren D. Walensky at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. As an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Yale University, Dr. Katz manages a laboratory deciphering the basic mechanisms of cell death and contributes to patient care as an active hematopathologist.

Dr. Kazmierczak received her Ph.D. from Rockefeller University (1993) and her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College (1994), both in New York City. She completed an Internal Medicine residency and Infectious Diseases fellowship training at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined the Yale faculty in 2001.  She is currently a Professor of Medicine and Microbial Pathogenesis, and Director of the MD-PhD program at Yale.

Dr. Kazmierczak's research program is broadly focused on bacterial and host factors that allow opportunistic infections to occur.  Using Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a clinically relevant model, her lab addresses fundamental questions of how cell-envelope spanning bacterial machines - the Type 3 secretion system, Type 4 pili and polar flagellum - are assembled, regulated, and used during infection.  She has also identified host responses directed at components of these virulence associated structures, in particular those mediated by the NLRC4 inflammasome. Inflammatory responses to bacteria are also a focus of her work on microbiome-host interactions in infants with Cystic Fibrosis, where her lab has used longitudinal data acquired over five years from cohorts of patients and controls to understand gut microbiome composition and the inflammatory and metabolic responses at this site. 

Dr. Kazmierczak has been recognized as a Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases (2007), a Donaghue Investigator (2002), and a Hellman Family Fellow (2002).  She is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Academy for Microbiology.

We are interested in how embryonic pattern is generated and the resultant congenital malformations that occur when patterning fails. During development, the egg must activate a cascade of genes in order to form our body structure and establish correct pattern along the body axes. We are deeply interested in the gene regulatory networks that are necessary to create critical signals in specific embryonic locations at appropriate developmental stages. These signals must be carefully orchestrated in order to generate forms that are essential to function and the overall fitness of the organism.

Our main approach is gene discovery from patients with congenital malformations, and then study them in our rapid, human model, Xenopus tropicalis. Recently, the remarkable advances in human genetics/genomics is transforming our understanding of the causes of congenital malformations. Traditionally gene discovery in these patients was very challenging, but new sequencing technologies enable gene discovery in these patients. In human studies, we have identified many new genes and are analyzing their patterning mechanisms in Xenopus. Combining human genetics with a high-throughput model system has allowed us to discover new genetic mechanisms and novel understanding of how development proceeds.

Dr. Kibbey obtained his undergraduate degrees in music (B.A.) and an honors degree in biochemistry (B.S.) at Trinity University in San Antonio in 1991. He then obtained his combined M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 2000. His Ph.D. was in Cellular and Molecular Biophysics and involved determining the NMR structure of peptides from the LDL receptor under his mentors Drs. R.G.W. Anderson and L. Gierasch. Subsequently, he went to Yale University in where he was selected for the ABIM short-track in Categorical Internal Medicine. In 2002 he stayed on for his Endocrinology fellowship at Yale and is now board certified in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology. While in his fellowship he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Gerald Shulman on metabolism in the pathophysiology of Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus. Here he identified mitochondrial GTP as a metabolic signal in the mitochondria sensing flux in the pancreatic beta-cell as a crucial component of the signal to secrete insulin. His laboratory also has developed a novel platform using stable isotopes and mass spectrometry named Mass Isotopomer MultiOrdinate Spectral Analysis (MIMOSA) that measures the flow of metabolism inside and between tissues. He is now an Associate Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine/Endocrinology and Cellular & Molecular Physiology. He continues to see patients at Yale Health and has an independent NIH-supported laboratory doing research on islet and whole body physiology in order to understand/prevent/treat Type-2 diabetes.

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.

Diane Krause MD, PhD is Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Pathology and Cell Biology at Yale University; Associate Director of the Yale Stem Cell Center; and Director of the Clinical Cell Processing Laboratory. She received an Sc.B. degree in Biology from Brown University, and an MD and PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing a residency in Clinical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, she performed post-doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Smita Krishnaswamy was trained as a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan's EECS department where her research focused on algorithms for automated synthesis and verification of nanoscale logic circuits that exhibit probabilistic effects. During her Ph.D., she received a best paper award at DATE 2005 (a top conference in the field of design automation), and an outstanding dissertation award. She published numerous first-author papers on probabilistic network models and algorithms for VLSICAD. In addition, her dissertation was published as a book by Springer in 2013. Following her Ph.D., she joined IBM's TJ Watson Research Center as a scientist in the systems division, where she focused on formal methods for automated error detection. Her Deltasyn algorithm was eventually utilized in IBMs p and z series high-performance chips. She then switched her research efforts to biology. Her postdoctoral training was completed at Columbia University in the systems biology department where she focused on learning computational models of cellular signaling from single-cell mass cytometry data.

Although technologies such as mass cytometry, and single-cell RNA sequencing, are able to generate high-dimensional high-throughput single-cell data, the computational, modeling and visualization techniques needed to analyze and make sense of this data are still lacking. Smita's research addresses this challenge by developing scalable computational methods for analyzing and learning predictive network models from massive biological datasets. Her methods for characterizing interactions in cellular signaling networks, published in a recent Science paper, reveal the computation performed by cells as they process signals in terms of stochastic response functions. Smita, along with experimental collaborators, have applied these methods to T cell signaling and have found that signaling response functions are reconfigured through differentiation and disease. For example, Smita and her collaborators found that subtle alterations in receptor-proximal signaling in non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice are amplified through signaling cascades leading to larger defects in downstream signals responsible for damping immune response. Her ongoing work involves creating more sophisticated and accurate models of transformational biological processes by combining both single-cell signaling and genomic data. At Yale, she is creating a forward-looking and interdisciplinary research group that is focused on developing computational techniques to solve today’s challenging biological and medical problems.

The Kupfer laboratory is working on HTLV I Tax protein, which has a unique kinase activation activity. They are harnessing this activity in order to chemosensitize p53 mutant tumor cells, thereby serving as an adjunct to enhance cancer therapy.<_o3a_p>

Dr. Kyriakides completed a PhD at Washington State University in 1993. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington. His lab at Yale studies the molecular events that dictate the foreign body response to biomaterials. In addition, Dr. Kyriakides studies nanomaterials and cell interactions with a focus on biosensing. Finally, ongoing efforts in the lab include vascular engineering and engineering of tissue constructs to stimulate healing in diabetic wounds. He is Director of Graduate Studies for the Experimental Pathology PhD program. He also serves as a mentor for students from the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Monkol received an undergraduate degree in Engineering (Computer Engineering) in 2000 at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and then worked for IBM for 3.5 years. He returned to UNSW and completed undergraduate degrees in Science (Physiology) and Engineering (Bioinformatics) and received the University Medal in 2007. He completed his PhD (Medicine) at the University of Sydney in 2012 with the thesis topic: Functional differences between alpha-actinin-2 and alpha-actinin-3. Monkol did his post-doctoral training in Daniel MacArthur’s lab based at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.  

He was the lead author/analyst for the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) project that was published in Nature 2016. He went on to lead the NIH funded Broad Center for Mendelian Genomics (CMG) analysis team. As lead analyst, he oversaw the analysis strategy for all major CMG collaborations and organized monthly meetings to foster sharing of new methods and analysis amongst the rare disease community. He also coordinated the data processing and preliminary analysis of NIH Gabriella Miller Kids First (GMKF) cohorts sequenced or reprocessed at the Broad Institute.

Monkol has a strong passion for rare muscle disease research as a patient with Limb Girdle Muscular dystrophy (LGMD2G). During his time in the Broad Institute, he lead the exome/genome analysis of MYOSEQ (European cohort of >1000 LGMD patients) and SeqNMD (an international consortium of undiagnosed rare muscle diseases) which has resulted in novel disease gene discovery.

Bluma (Bibi) Lesch works on the genetics and epigenetics of reproduction and development, with a special interest in the evolution of epigenetic and chromatin states in mammals. Understanding the evolution of gene regulation in gametes requires integrating information across a wide range of biological scales, from the regulation of molecules to the development of individuals to the evolution of species. Dr. Lesch’s work brings together these divergent approaches to thinking about biology.

Dr. Lesch earned her B.S. from Yale University in 2003. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2010 from Rockefeller University and her M.D. in 2011 from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.  She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA, from 2011-2017, where she was awarded an NIH Kirschstein postdoctoral fellowship and also named a Hope Funds for Cancer Research postdoctoral fellow.  She received a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists in 2015, and returned to New Haven to join the Yale faculty in 2017.

Janghoo Lim received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in South Korea. He then completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral trainings at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. He joined Yale in 2010 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Genetics and of Neuroscience.

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-).

Dr. Lindenbach received his B.S. from the University of Illinois, and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied the replication of RNA viruses. He completed postdoctoral studies with Dr. Paul Ahlquist at the HHMI/University of Wisconsin and with Dr. Charlie Rice at The Rockefeller University, where he developed the first robust cell culture model of hepatitis C virus. Dr. Lindenbach has been a member of the Yale faculty since 2006 and received tenure in 2017.

Dr. Liu received his PhD of Biomedical Sciences at Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Liu completed a post-doctoral research fellowship (May 2011 - October 2017) in the Proteomics Laboratory of Dr. Ruedi Aebersold in the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Liu joined Yale Cancer Biology Institute as an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology in December 2017. His research group at Yale aims to contribute to the development of Data independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry and other proteomic techniques and their applications in Cancer Biology and Systems Biology studies. 

Dr. Carrie L. Lucas received her PhD from Harvard Medical School and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health, NIAID. Her laboratory investigates signaling in T cells from healthy people and patients with inherited immune disorders to dissect pathways critical for adaptive immunity. A major focus of her work has been on phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling and mechanisms of disease in immunodeficient patients with activating mutations in PI3K subunits.

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.

John MacMicking is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He trained in synthetic organic chemistry at the Australian National University (B.Sc, 1st Class Honors) where he conducted thesis work in the Department of Immunology & Cell Biology formerly headed by 1996 Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, at the the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

He then came to the U.S. to pursue Ph.D studies with Carl Nathan in the Immunology program at Cornell University-Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City before being selected as an HHMI Life Science Research Foundation Fellow at The Rockefeller University to conduct studies with John Mckinney.

His doctoral dissertation described the first knockout of an innate immune gene in mammals - inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) - genetically engineered between 1992-1995. It served as an early paradigm for cell-autonomous immunity to infection. At Rockefeller University he computationally identified, physically mapped and began functionally characterizing a complete IFN-inducible GTPase superfamily in humans and mice as a new defense network operating against all pathogen classes. For these discoveries he has been named a Edward Mallinckrodt Jr Foundation Fellow (2004), Searle Scholar (2005), Cancer Research Institute Investigator (2006), Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Investigator (2008), CCFA Senior Research Awardee (2010), AAF Scholar (2014) and Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator (2014).

Dr. MacMicking was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and received Tenure in 2014. He was chosen as an HHMI Investigator in 2015 before moving to the Yale Systems Biology Institute in 2017. 

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.

My laboratory’s major focus is the identification of genetic causes of major cardiovascular disorders and the elucidation of their pathophysiology. Through collaborative efforts with physicians and scientist across the world we have recruited large populations of patients and families with early onset coronary artery disease and metabolic syndrome and have successfully mapped and identified number of genes for these diseases. An ongoing effort in the laboratory is to understand the function of these genes and how the mutations affect the phenotype, using mouse and zebrafish models.

Having unique access to the genetic study population, we have had the opportunity to carry out clinical studies to investigate the disease mechanisms and have made numerous novel discoveries. We are actively investigating pathways that regulate insulin signaling, glucose metabolism, VLDL and LDL syntheis and clearance and atherosclerosis.

In addition, my laboratory studies the genetic causes of adult congenital heart disease, such as bicuspid aortic valve, atrial fibrillation and patent ductus arteriosus.

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

Dr. Miller-Jensen is working on systems-scale approaches to studying virus infection, latency, and gene expression with a focus on HIV, an important human carcinogen in conjunction with other agents. Cancer is now a leading cause of death in HIV infected individuals. Other areas of interest are attempts to better understand replication and evolution of VSV, a potential oncolytic agent, and development of methods to examine the secretory profile of single cells.

Dr. Mothes studied chemistry (Diploma 1993) and received a Ph.D. in cell biology (Humboldt-University Berlin, 1998) for his studies on protein secretion and membrane protein integration at the endoplasmic reticulum under the mentorship of Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. John Young and James Cunningham on retroviral entry before he started his own laboratory at Yale University in 2001. Dr. Mothes was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007 and received Tenure in 2011.

Michael Murrell is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department, and the Systems Biology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Murrell received his B.S. from Johns Hopkins University in Biomedical Engineering and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Bioengineering working for Paul Matsudaira and Roger Kamm. He then pursued his postdoctoral studies jointly with Margaret Gardel at the University of Chicago, and Cecile Sykes at the Institut Curie in Paris, France.

Murrell's interests are in understanding the mechanical principles that drive major cellular life processes through the design and engineering of novel biomimetic systems. To this end, he develops simplified and tractable experimental models of the mechanical machinery within the cell with the goal of reproducing complex cellular behavior, such as cell division and cell migration. Murrell then combines these ‘bottom-up’ experimental models with concepts from soft matter physics to gain a fundamental understanding of the influence of mechanics on cell and tissue behavior. In parallel, he hopes to identify new design principles from biology which can be used to create novel technologies.

Dr. Muzumdar graduated from Harvard College and received his Doctorate of Medicine from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Yale faculty.

His laboratory is interested in understanding the mechanisms by which genetic and environmental factors contribute to cancer initiation, progression, and maintenance. Leveraging a combination of sophisticated genetically-engineered cell and animal models, the lab seeks to define the molecular basis for the tumor cell and host adaptations that drive cancer progression. Furthermore, the lab uses genetic and pharmacologic approaches combined with novel nanoparticle-based delivery methods to augment or impede these adaptations and determine the consequences on cancer development in these models. The ultimate goal of this research is to identify novel approaches for cancer prevention and treatment.

• 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

• B.S., Microbiology and Immunology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 1998.
• Ph.D., Microbiology and Immunology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. 2004
• Post-doctoral fellow, Cancer Biology and Genetics, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, New York, NY. 2004-9.

Michael Nitabach JD, PhD is faculty member of Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics and Development, Molecular Medicine, Pharmacology and Physiology, and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. He is affiliated with the Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. He received a PhD from Columbia University and a JD from New York University.

Dr. Noonan received his undergraduate degree in Biology and English Literature (Honors) from Binghamton University in upstate New York. He carried out his graduate work with Dr. Richard Myers in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. in 2004. He did his postdoctoral work in Dr. Edward Rubin's lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Dr. Noonan joined the Yale Genetics faculty in September 2007.

Katerina Politi studied Biology at the University of Pavia in Italy. She then moved to New York, where she obtained her PhD in Genetics and Development working with Argiris Efstratiadis at Columbia University. Following graduate school, she joined Harold Varmus's lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and began her work on the molecular basis of lung cancer. She continues this work at Yale as an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and the Yale Cancer Center.

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.

Yibing Qyang obtained his B.S. degree from the Department of Biochemistry, Nanjing University, China and subsequently pursued graduate studies at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Then he joined the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. After receiving his M.S. degree from Dr. Michele Sawadogo’s laboratory, and his Ph.D. from Dr. Stevan Marcus’s lab, he spent the next year conducting postdoctoral research at Baylor College of Medicine, where he studied myeloproliferative diseases with a mouse model of Presenilin deficiency. He next joined Dr. Kenneth R. Chien's laboratory at the University of California, San Diego and then the Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He has been studying the renewal and differentiation of cardiovascular progenitor cells, marked by Isl1, a LIM-Homeodomain transcription factor, as well as cardiovascular disease mechanisms using human stem cell and animal models. In October 2008, Dr. Qyang became a principal investigator at the Yale Cardiovascular Research Institute and Section of Cardiology, Dept. of Internal Medicine, and Yale Stem Cell Center. Since 2010, he has been Director of the Yale Stem Cell Research Forum.

Currently, the Qyang laboratory has the following members:

1. Yongming Ren, Ph.D. (Associate Research Scientist; Yale entry level faculty position), graduated from Tsinghua University, China, in 2007. Dr. Ren was awarded a Connecticut Stem Cell grant ($200,000; 11/1/2012 – 10/30/2014).

2. Oscar Bartulos-Encinas, Ph.D. (Associate Research Scientist; Yale entry level faculty position), graduated from University of Madrid, Spain, in 2009. Dr. Bartulos was awarded a Connecticut Stem Cell grant ($200,000; 11/1/2013 – 10/30/2015).

3. Jiesi Luo, Ph.D. (Postdoc), graduated from Michigan State University, USA in 2014.

4. Jinkyu Park, Ph.D. (Postdoc), graduated from Seoul National University, South Korea in 2013.

5. Liqiong Gui, Ph.D., Associate Scientist, graduated from University of Rochester, USA in 2006, and a supported collaborator.

6. Lingfeng Qin, M.D., Research Scientist, and a supported collaborator.

7. Xia Li, M.D., visiting scholar from China.

8. Nicole Boardman, Yale Junior Undergraduate Student.

Previous Qyang lab members:

1. Min Young Lee, D.V.M, Ph.D. (graduated from Chonnam National University, Korea), postdoc training in Qyang lab (2009-2012), now Assistant Professor in Department of Molecular Physiology, College of Pharmacy, Kyungpook National University , South Korea.

2. Esra Cagavi Bozkulak, Ph.D. (graduated from University of California, Los Angeles, USA), postdoc training in Qyang lab (2010-2012), now Assistant Professor in Gebze Institute of Technology, Faculty of Science, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, K:141, 41400, Gebze-Kocaeli, Turkey.

3. Xin Ge, Ph.D., (graduated from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA), postdoc training in Qyang lab (2010-2013). Dr. Ge was awarded a Brown-Coxe postdoctoral fellowship ($50,000; 7/1/2011 – 6/31/2012). Dr. Ge is now an Assistant Professor in Shanghai Jiaotong University, China.

4. Peter John Amos, Ph.D., (graduated from University of Virginia), postdoc training in Qyang lab (2010-2013), now a scientist at University of Washington Seattle, Dr. Amos was awarded a Connecticut Stem Cell grant ($200,000; 9/1/2011 – 6/30/2013) during his training in Qyang lab.

5. Biraja Dash, Ph.D., graduated from Network of Excellence in Functional Biomaterials, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland in 2014, trained in Qyang lab (2013-2016), now a scientist at Department of Surgery, Yale University.

6. Zhengxin Jiang, Ph.D. (graduated from Baylor College of Medicine, USA), postdoc training in Qyang lab (2013-2015), now a scientist at Northwestern University.

7. Ting Yi, Ph.D. (Postdoc), graduated from University of Vermont, USA in 2013, trained in Qyang lab (2013-2015), now pursuing a MBA degree at Quinnipiac University.

8. Carol Suh, graduate student who obtained a M.S. degree (2012-2014). She obtained her B.S. from Harvard University in 2011.

9. Hongwei Wu, M.D., visiting student who obtained Ph.D. degree (2011-2014). He was from The Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University.

10. Yan Xu, M.D., visiting scholar (2014) from The Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University.

11. Jessica Tuan, Master Student at Yale Biomedical Engineering (2011-2012), now a medical student at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

12. Caroline Greenberg, Summer Intern 2011, Medical Student in Yale School of Medicine.

13. Andre Alcon, Summer Intern 2011, Medical Student in Yale School of Medicine.

14. Grant Senyei, Yale Undergraduate student (2008-2010), now a medical student at Northwestern University School of Medicine

15. Karen Xiao, Summer Intern 2012, undergraduate student at Georgetown University.

16. Zelun Wang, undergraduate summer student 2013 from Rice University.

17. Mengyan Liu, undergraduate summer student 2014 from University of New Haven.

18. Hong Wu, Ph.D., visiting scholar from China.

Hesper trained as physicist in both her undergraduate studies (Caltech, B.S. Physics, 2005), and her graduate studies (UCSF, PhD, Biophysics, 2011). She did her graduate work with the late Mats Gustafsson at UCSF and Janelia Farm. In his group, she developed a nonlinear form of Structured-Illumination Microscopy. Afterwards, wanting to explore a biological phenomenon she did her postdoctoral work with Eric Rubin at the Harvard School of Public Health where she became fascinated by the ability of genetically identical organisms to display different phenotypes. This phenomenon is especially important for the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She is excited to start a research group at the intersection of these two areas: the application of advanced light microscopy techniques to investigate the strategies mycobacteria use to survive the stresses imposed by antibiotics and host.

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.

David Rimm is a Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine. He completed an MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins University Medical School followed by a Pathology Residency at Yale and a Cytopathology Fellowship at the Medical College of Virginia. He is board certified in Anatomic Pathology and Cytopathology. At Yale since 1994, Dr. Rimm is the Director of Yale Pathology Tissue Services and the Yale Tissue Microarray Facility. He is a member of the Executive Team in Pathology and serves as the Director of Translational Pathology. His lab group focuses on quantitative pathology using the AQUA^® technology invented in his lab with projects related to predicting response to therapy or recurrence or metastasis in breast and lung cancer.The technology has also been used in a series of efforts related to biospecimen science. The work is supported by grants from the NIH, BCRF, and sponsored research agreements from biopharma. He is a member of a number of correlative science committees for multi-institutional breast cancer clinical trials including SWOG, ALLTO, and TEACH.He also serves on the Molecular Oncology committee for the College of American Pathologists (CAP).He is an author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and 8 patents.He has served on advisory boards for Amgen, Genentech, Novartis, BMS, Perkin Elmer, Dako, ACD, Biocept, OptraScan and Genoptix.He was a scientific co-founder of HistoRx, a digital pathology company (sold to Genoptix in 2012) and Metamark Genetics, a prognostic determinant company.

Dr. Jesse Rinehart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular & Molecular Physiology at the Yale University School of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Systems Biology Institute. Dr. Rinehart’s research aims to understand and “decode” the roles of protein phosphorylation in humans. His laboratory uses an innovative combination of quantitative phosphoproteomics and synthetic biology study protein phosphorylation in single proteins and protein networks. Recently, research in Dr. Rinehart’s laboratory has been accelerated by their Escherichia coli based technology that enables site-specific incorporation of phosphoserine into human proteins. Dr. Rinehart received his PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale in 2005. He studied protein synthesis and the evolution of the genetic code during his graduate work with Dr. Dieter Söll. His did his postdoctoral research with Richard Lifton in the Department of Genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine and focused on understanding the role of protein phosphorylation in physiological systems.

Dr. Rose earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1973 in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Yanofsky. His thesis research focused on regulation of the tryptophan operon of E. coli. He then did postdoctoral research at MIT in the laboratories of Drs. David Baltimore and Harvey Lodish, where he began work on eucaryotic RNA viruses. In 1978, Dr. Rose took a faculty position at the Salk Institute, where he continued work on RNA virus transcription, as well as structure, function, and transport of the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) glycoprotein. In 1986, he moved to become Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine. In 1994, his laboratory developed a system for recovering non-segmented, negative-strand RNA viruses from DNA plasmids. His work at Yale during the past fifteen years has focused largely on new approaches to vaccine development using vectors based on recombinant VSV and other viral replicons. This work has led to development of robust vaccine platforms that can protect animals against numerous viral and bacterial pathogens, typically after a single dose. A VSV-based HIV vaccine advanced from the Rose laboratory has recently completed a successful Phase I clinical trial.

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).

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.

Martin Schwartz earned a BA in chemistry from New College in Sarasota FL and a PhD in physical chemistry from Stanford, where he worked in Harden McConnell’s lab on biophysics of phospholipid membranes.He then did postdoctoral research in biology at MIT in the laboratory of Richard Hynes where he studied interactions of fibronectin with cells and other proteins. He was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, Scripps Research Institute and the University of Virginia prior to moving to Yale in 2011. Starting in the 1980’s, his lab was among the first to report that integrin mediated adhesion could regulate signaling pathways in cells;that integrin-mediated adhesion promotes cell survival, that integrins synergize with growth factor receptors to activate growth signaling pathways and that integrins regulate Rho family GTPases. His lab has also elucidated mechanotransduction pathways by which endothelial cells respond to fluid shear stress to activate inflammatory pathways linked to atherosclerosis. His current research program combines studies using biophysical, cellular and animal approaches to important questions about integrin signaling, mechanotransduction and disease in the vascular system.

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.

Dr. Stern earned a BS in Biology at MIT in 1976. He received a PhD in Biology in 1983 at University of California, San Diego, and the Salk Institute with S.I.T. Kennedy and Bart Sefton for dissertation research that elucidated the coronavirus lytic cycle. Dr. Stern returned to R.A. Weinberg’s lab at the MIT Cancer Center and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in 1983. There, Dr. Stern’s postdoctoral work pioneered analysis of neu/ErbB2/HER2, an important human oncogene. As a Yale Pathology faculty member since 1988, Dr. Stern’s research has focused on the roles of eleven growth factors and four receptors of the EGF family in malignant transformation, especially in breast cancer, and he has also made significant contributions to the understanding of DNA damage response signaling pathways. Dr. Stern’s current work in breast cancer and melanoma includes developing approaches to countering rapid resistance to anti-cancer agents that target cancer signaling pathways. Dr. Stern is active in cancer training at Yale and in the Yale Cancer Center scientific leadership. He is co-leader of the Signal Transduction Research Program and Associate Director of Shared Resources of the Yale Cancer Center.

Stephen M. Strittmatter earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, summa cum laude, in 1980. He completed M.D. and Ph.D. training at Johns Hopkins in 1986 with mentorship from Solomon H. Snyder, M.D. He then moved to Massachusetts General Hospital for a medical internship and an Adult Neurology residency. While at Massachusetts General Hospital, he worked as a Research Fellow with Mark Fishman, M.D., exploring the molecular basis of axonal guidance. After a year as Fellow, he served briefly as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School before moving to Yale University in 1993.

He currently holds the Vincent Coates Professorship of Neurology and co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. His research on axonal growth during development and regeneration has been recognized by honors from the Ameritec Foundation, the John Merck Fund, the Donaghue Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Jacob Javits Award of the NINDS and the American Academy of Neurology.

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. The work may also lead to the development of new therapeutic targets and strategies for immune diseases and cancers.   

After finishing his undergraduate studies at Brown University, Dr. Sutton enrolled in the MSTP at Stanford, where he obtained his PhD degree with Dr. John Boothroyd, working on African trypanosomes. He then completed a categorical residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship in infectious diseases at UCSF. After post-doctoral stints with Drs. Harold Varmus, Dan Littman, and Pat Brown in which he worked on HTLV cell binding and entry and the development of HIV-based gene therapy vectors, he joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2008 he was recruited to Yale to continue his work on HIV replication and lentiviral vectors. Dr. Sutton spends approximately 50% of his time at the research bench and 25% in the clinical setting, both out-patient and in-patient. Currently he is also the chief of ID at VACT in West Haven.

Dr. Flora Vaccarino graduated in Medicine at Padua University in Italy and studied neuropharmacology and cell biology at NIH as a research fellow before starting her Residency in Psychiatry at Yale University. After her residency, she studied developmental biology and genetics and was appointed Assistant Professor at Yale University. Her interests are the development of the mammalian the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia and connected forebrain regions as well as the regulation of neural stem cells in both embryonic and postnatal periods. Her lab has been investigating how genetic (i.e., tyrosine growth factor receptors like Fibroblast Growth Factors) and epigenetic factors (i.e., perinatal hypoxia, environmental enrichment) affect the proliferation the maturation of neural progenitor cells in mouse models. Recently she has been exploring how induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be used to model developmental neuropsychiatric disorders including autism and Rett syndrome. With a group of colleagues, Dr. Vaccarino, now a full Professor at Yale University School of Medicine, founded in 2009 the “Program in Neurodevelopment and Regeneration” (https://medicine.yale.edu/neurodevelopment/index.aspx), a collaborative interdepartmental program at Yale University that is leading interdisciplinary studies on iPSCs, neural stem cells and human development.Dr. Vaccarino is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the PsychENCODE and the Brain Somatic Mosaicism Consortia.

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.

Julia von Blume obtained her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Thomas Seufferlein at the University of Ulm where she investigated signaling dependent nuclear transport of protein kinase D (PKD). In 2007 she moved to the laboratory of Vivek Malhotra at University of San Diego (UCSD), USA and Centre Regulacio Genomica (CRG), Spain. During her work as a postdoctoral fellow she discovered a novel sorting mechanism for secretory proteins. The major components that regulate this unique sorting process include F-actin, cofilin, the Golgi Ca²⁺ ATPase SPCA1, Ca²⁺, and Cab45. She then moved as an independent group leader to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich Germany to further dissect the sorting mechanism using in vitro reconstitution and cell biology. Her research program at Yale focuses on sorting reactions in the trans-Golgi Network (TGN) with particular emphasis on the role of protein and lipid complexes that recognize and pack secreted proteins into specific transport carriers. This process is crucial to facilitate the secretion and function of these factors in different cell types and organisms.

Dr. Walther is a physician-scientist with clinical expertise in gastrointestinal and liver pathology, the molecular diagnostics of surgical pathology specimens, and molecular oncology of solid tumors. As Clinical Director of the YNHH Tumor Profiling Laboratory, she focuses on molecular and genomic analyses of solid tumor specimens, to enable the identification of therapeutic targets within individual patients' cancers, and thus to promote precision medicine in oncology.

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. Wilson graduated from Duke University and received his PhD at Yale University and MD at Harvard Medical School.  He completed an internship and residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.  He completed a research fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.  His research focuses on the identification and characterization of genetic vulnerabilities in cancer as well as genetic determinants of sensitivity and resistance to targeted therapies.

Dr. Andrew Xiao is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is a member of the Yale Stem Cell Center. Dr. Xiao’s laboratory focuses on epigenetic regulation in pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotenct stem cells (iPSC). His laboratory has made significant contributions to the understanding of the maintenance of pluripotency, as well as the recent discovery of novel epigenetic mechanisms, i.e., N6-methyl-adenine, in mammalian genomes. Dr. Xiao received his Ph.D degree from Terry Van Dyke’s lab at UNC-Chapel Hill and postdoctoral training from David Allis’ lab at Rockefeller University. Since 2009, Andrew Xiao is a recipient of the NCI Howard Temin Award in Cancer Research (K99/R00) and in 2012, he received the New Scholar Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

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.

Dr. Qin Yan （严钦) is an Associate Professor of Pathology at Yale Medical School and a member of Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center and Yale Stem Cell Center. He directs a research laboratory to elucidate the roles of epigenetic mechanisms that drive tumor initiation and progression and to translate the findings to the clinic. His laboratory has made significant contributions to the understanding of KDM5 H3K4me3/2 histone demethylases. Dr. Yan received his B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. After his Ph.D. training on regulation of transcription and ubiquitination with Drs. Joan and Ronald Conaway at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and Stowers Institute for Medical Research, he completed his postdoctoral training on cancer biology with HHMI Investigator Dr. William Kaelin at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He has received numerous awards including Era of Hope Scholar Award from DoD Breast Cancer Research Program, Stewart Scholar Award and V Scholar Award.

Dr. Xiaoyong Yang is an Associate Professor of Comparative Medicine and of Cellular & Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine. He received B.S. from Nankai University, M.S. from Peking University, and Ph.D. from University of Alabama at Birmingham with Dr. Jeffrey Kudlow. He completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Ronald Evans at The Salk Institute. Dr. Yang has published in Nature, Cell, Cell Metabolism, Molecular Cell, Genes & Development, PNAS, etc., and been frequently invited to speak at national and international conferences and academic institutions. Dr. Yang serves on scientific review panels for the NIDDK, NIGMS, NASA, American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, The Medical Research Council, The Wellcome Trust, National Natural Science Foundation of China, etc. Research in his laboratory is supported by The National Institutes of Health, The State of Connecticut, American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and Ellison Medical Foundation.

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.

Ph.D. Yale University, 2003

Research interest: Single-molecule biophysics and biochemistry

M.S. Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, 1997

Research interest: Theoretical biophysics

Dr. Hongyu Zhao is the Ira V. Hiscock Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics and Data Science and Genetics, Chair of the Biostatistics Department and the Co-Director of Graduate Studies of the Inter-Departmental Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Yale University. He received his B.S. in Probability and Statistics from Peking University in 1990 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. His research interests are the applications of statistical methods in molecular biology, genetics, drug developments, and precision medicine.

Some of his recent projects include large scale genome wide studies to identify genetic variants underlying complex diseases, genetic risk prediction, biological network modeling and analysis, disease biomarker identification, genome annotation, cancer genomics, microbiome analysis, single cell analysis, image analysis, and systems biology study of herbal medicine. He has published over 480 articles in statistics, human genetics, bioinformatics, and proteomics, and edited two books on human genetics analysis and statistical genomics. He has trained over 70 doctoral and post-doctoral students, many of whom are holding tenured or tenure-track positions at major universities in the states and overseas.

Dr. Zhao is a Co-Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association Theory and Methods, and serves on the editorial boards of several leading statistical and genetics journals. He was the recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award for a top statistician in health statistics under the age of 40 awarded by the American Public Health Association and the Pao-Lu Hsu Award from the International Chinese Statistical Association. His research has also been recognized by the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation by UC Berkeley, a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award by the March of Dimes Foundation, election to the fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Dr. Yong Zhu is an Associate Professor at Yale University School of Public Health and Assistant Director of Yale Cancer Center for Global Cancer Epidemiology. Dr. Zhu's research interests are oriented towards the use of the molecular epidemiological approach in the study of genetic susceptibility biomarkers and their interactions with environmental exposures in human disease development. Dr. Zhu has been developing and validating novel phenotypic and genotypic assays and biomarkers for several cancer types, including non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, breast, bladder, lung and prostate cancer. By utilizing various techniques in genetics, epigenetics, cytogenetics, cell biology, and computational biology, his studies have identified biomarkers that can characterize inherited predisposition and cellular response to environmental factors. Current research focuses on studying the role of two transcriptional factors, circadian genes and small noncoding RNAs, in tumorigenesis.