UCSF Sandler Fellows:
Mustafa Aydogan, D. Phil. Mustafa is fascinated by how biological time is regulated across different scales, with a particular interest in the regulation of organelle biogenesis. He carried out his doctoral work at the University of Oxford to study how centriole biogenesis is regulated in space and time. In particular, he discovered that an autonomous clock controls the timing of centriole formation – independently of, but in entrainment with, the principal Cdk/Cyclin cell-cycle oscillator. This finding challenges the current model of how cell cycle is regulated and opens a potential new avenue of research to explore whether other such autonomous clocks exist in the cell. The Aydogan Lab currently focuses on timing mechanisms that may be at play in the biogenesis of other organelles. They use state-of-the-art techniques in live super-resolution microscopy, combined with genetics, biochemistry, biophysics and mathematical modelling, to address biological phenomena.
Nicole DelRosso, Ph.D. Nicole received her Ph.D. from the Department of Biophysics at Stanford University in 2024. She worked in the labs of Dr. Lacramioara Bintu and Dr. Polly Fordyce where she discovered hundreds of transcriptional effector domains in human cells and provided the first quantitative map of their disordered interactions with cofactors using a novel microfluidic platform she developed to measure protein-protein binding affinities in high-throughput. The DelRosso Lab at UCSF builds high-throughput techniques to systematically identify molecular interactions that regulate transcription in human cells. They aim to not only understand how disordered proteins recognize their partners to regulate gene expression strength and timing, but also eventually engineer these interactions to enable cellular fate control.
Bill Jia, Ph.D. Bill aims to understand how ion physiology is used as a computational medium for cellular behavior. He did his graduate work at Harvard University with Adam Cohen and Sean Megason, where he advanced methods for optogenetic control and measurement of electrophysiology in developing zebrafish embryos and identified a mechanism for the initiation and organization of electrical activity in an embryo’s first heartbeats. Starting in the summer of 2025, the Jia Lab will study the biophysical and molecular mechanisms of ionic signal transduction, and their bidirectional relationship with the organization of form and function at the tissue scale. The lab will employ and develop synthetic biology tools, custom optical instrumentation, and quantitative image analysis methods to do so. Bill is particularly interested in exploring the similarities and differences between such mechanisms in conventional “spiking” cell types (neurons, muscle) and less-explored “non-excitable” cell types, using developing tissues with emerging physiology, including the myocardium, as model systems.
Laurel Kinman, Ph.D. Laurel received her Ph.D. in biology from MIT, working in the lab of Dr. Joseph Davis. In graduate school, Laurel developed computational approaches to quantitatively characterize the conformational landscapes sampled by large protein complexes via heterogeneous cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and applied these approaches to better understand how these complexes are assembled and regulated. She also developed and applied novel experimental methods to characterize the regulation of highly dynamic protein complexes involved in autophagosome biogenesis in yeast, demonstrating that diverse environmental signals jointly regulate assembly of the yeast autophagosome through highly distributed phosphorylation, and yet produce distinct proteome-wide degradation profiles. As a Sandler Fellow, Laurel is excited to work with her lab to understand the structural basis for cellular information processing and decision-making. In particular, the Kinman lab will focus on leveraging a diverse array of state-of-the-art structural approaches, in combination with high-throughput and proteomics methods, to begin to answer long-standing questions about how cells use multi-site phosphorylation to coordinate complex responses to their external environment.
Margaux Pinney, Ph.D. Margaux received her Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University. As a graduate student in Dr. Daniel Herschlag’s lab, she studied the molecular mechanisms of enzyme temperature adaptation. This work ultimately tested and refined most existing models of enzyme temperature adaptation and identified new molecular mechanisms for enzyme stability and activity in >1000 enzyme families. Margaux then joined the laboratories of Dr. Polly Fordyce and Dr. Gavin Sherlock at Stanford to adapt and develop methods for mapping between protein function and organism fitness in high throughput. The Pinney Lab studies the molecular mechanisms that allow organisms and their proteins to adapt to new and changing environments, with a focus on temperature adaptation. They use high-throughput biochemistry and organism fitness methods to integrate information across biological scales. The central goals of this work are to: (1) reveal enigmatic aspects of protein function to inform their design principles and (2) provide a fundamental understanding of organism adaptation, which is critical for understanding processes such as adaptation to climate change.
Mark Pownall, Ph.D. Mark received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University in 2023. During this time, he worked with Dr. Antonio Giraldez studying the process of zygotic genome activation in developing zebrafish embryos. To visualize this conserved process of transcriptional activation at unprecedented resolution in vivo, Mark developed Chromatin Expansion Microscopy, a super-resolution imaging technique that physically enlarges developing embryos to dramatically improve imaging resolution without perturbing chromatin organization. This work provided insight into how pioneer transcription factors associate within individual nucleosomes in vivo, and led to a new model of enhancer-promoter interactions modulated by transcription. As a Sandler Fellow, Mark and his lab will study how chromatin structure relates to transcriptional activity during cell-fate specification in developing embryos. The lab will also continue developing advanced microscopy tools to visualize chromatin structure and function with the goal of understanding how 3D genome organization influences function.
Katherine Susa, Ph.D. Katherine received her Ph.D. from the Chemical Biology program at Harvard University. As a graduate student co-advised by Andrew Kruse and Stephen Blacklow, she used structural biology, protein engineering, and cell biology to understand mechanisms underlying B cell co-receptor complex assembly and signaling. As a Sandler Fellow, Katherine and her lab will study the molecular mechanisms underlying the function of human immune cell receptors, with the long-term goal of enabling new therapeutic approaches to modulate immune cell signaling. Work in the lab will initially focus on B cell signaling, a signaling pathway that is responsible for the production of antibodies and is frequently dysregulated in B cell cancers and autoimmune diseases. We will (1) develop new tools to identify and characterize novel regulators of early B cell signaling, (2) structurally characterize B cell receptor and co-receptor complexes to elucidate how B cell signaling is regulated, and (3) engineer cell-state-specific, modulatory antibodies that selectively target specific B cell subsets.
John Vaughen, Ph.D. John is captivated by lipids, amphiphilic macromolecules that dynamically signal and organize biochemical reactions across organelles. While we are unearthing a large combinatorial diversity of lipids across myriad cells, our understanding of lipid functions remains fragmentary. Lipid metabolism first ensnared John during his Ph.D. at Stanford (developmental biology). Under Tom Clandinin’s mentorship, John used Drosophila to dissect novel functions for a lipid hydrolase frequently mutated in Parkinson’s disease. These studies revealed that balanced sphingolipid metabolism tuned a diurnal pattern of extensive neurite growth and retraction in a circadian circuit by coupling glial catabolism with neural biosynthesis. His ongoing work combines genetics, lipidomics, microscopy, behavior, and biophysical modeling to probe the developing brain lipidome. Beginning in August 2024, John and his lab aim to 1) Identify the enzymes and signaling cascades that generate appropriate brain lipidomes; 2) Determine why and how specific lipids are deployed, such as in synaptic vesicles and glial ensheathments; and 3) Develop genetic and mass-spectrometry tools to better quantitate and manipulate lipids in the brain, which often dysregulates its lipids during aging and disease..
Caroline Vissers, Ph.D. Caroline received her PhD from the Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her work in the lab of Hongjun Song was the first to show the regulatory effect of chemical modifications on mRNA, termed “epitranscriptomics,” on mammalian cortical neurogenesis. One methylation in particular, m6A, regulates neural stem cell proliferation and differentiation and allows for pre-patterning of neural stem cell fate prior to differentiation. Additionally, Caroline collaborated with Gregg Semenza to study how m6A regulates breast cancer cell response to hypoxia. She showed that stress-induced dynamics of m6A regulate cancer cell gene expression at both RNA and protein levels, with consequences in cell proliferation and metabolism. As a UCSF Sandler Fellow, Caroline will lead a research program studying how the epitranscriptome is regulated, particularly in response to endogenous (developmental signaling pathways) and exogenous (stress) stimuli. This work will be applied to studies of neural development and disease with the ultimate goal of developing new therapies for developmental and neurodegenerative disorders.
Affiliated Fellows:
California Academy of Sciences Fellow:
Alison Gould, Ph.D. Alison earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology where she studied theevolutionary ecology of a bioluminescent symbiosis between a coral reef fish and a luminous bacterium in the Vibrio family. Having established the foundational context with which to study this association at a more mechanistic level, she is currently developing this highly specific, binary association as a new model with which to disentangle the complex mechanisms regulating our gut microbiome. In partnership with the California Academy of Sciences, Alison will study this bioluminescent symbiosis to determine how host-microbe specificity is established and maintained from the broad evolutionary scale down to the molecular level, identifying critical pathways involved in symbiont recognition, integration, and persistence within a host.
Physician-Scientist Scholar Program: The PSSP was established by the UCSF School of Medicine in partnership with the clinical departments to identify and support young physician/scientists who engage in medical practice and have shown exceptional promise to launch an independent laboratory research program, like UCSF Sandler Fellows. Information on these Fellows can be found here.