Faculty & Staff

Dr. Lusk runs the joint LusKing laboratory with Megan King in the Department of Cell Biology. He is also the co-director of the MCGD graduate training track. He 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 Nobel Laureate 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.

Megan received her B.A. in Biochemistry from Brandeis University working with Dr. Susan Lowey and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Mark Lemmon. During her postdoctoral training with Dr. Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University, she discovered new mechanisms for the targeting and function of integral inner nuclear membrane proteins. Since founding her own group in 2009, Megan has continued to investigate the broad array of biological functions that are integrated at the nuclear envelope, from impacts on DNA repair to nuclear and cellular mechanics. Megan was named a Searle Scholar in 2011, is a recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award and is currently an Allen Distinguished Investigator.

Born and raised in London, UK, Kerri came to the United States in 2015 to pursue further education. She graduated from Princeton University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology and certificate in Global Health Policy. After college, she spent two years as a Research Technician in the lab of Dr. Susan Parkhurst at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer research center where she studied the mechanism of Nuclear Envelope Budding using the Drosophila system.

Yu Xuan is a second year MDPhD student interested in studying somewhere at the intersection of structure-function, mechanistic cell biology, and systems biology. She received her Bachelor's in Chemistry at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 2021. She spent the first two years of undergrad at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO, designing inhibitors for the ZIKA virus using computational chemistry, specifically molecular dynamics simulations. She then transferred to UCSD in pursuit of research opportunities. She spent the next three years in the Lab of Andres Leschziner and Samara Reck Peterson using Cryo-Electron Microscopy to probe Parkinson's Disease pathology. Outside of science and medicine, she prefers to spend her time on the couch with her two dogs. On the occasion, you can also expect to find her at various coffee shops around New Haven.