Rockefeller University
Appointed in 1947
Columbia University
Appointed in 2022
Cells efficiently convert environmental information into specific functional responses through cascades of biochemical reactions and biomolecular interactions. High fidelity signal transduction requires spatiotemporal regulation of these molecular events. This can be accomplished through phase separation. Many signaling condensates dynamically assemble through multivalent protein–protein interactions mediated by modular interaction domains. How the molecular factors that drive phase separation enable coordinated and precise flow of information among myriad signaling pathways remains a mystery. To answer such questions that encompass molecular- and systems-level phenomena, my research focuses on developing integrative data- and physics-based modeling frameworks using the tools of machine learning and statistical mechanics. Using these approaches, I aim to decipher the modular grammar of signaling proteins that governs phase separation and, more broadly, the biophysical principles that underlie cell homeostasis.
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 2008
I am currently conducting research aimed at understanding sleep: its biological significance and how it is regulated.
I grew up in Belgrade, Serbia, convinced that the only interesting career would be in the arts or literature. Choosing science as my path came as a consequence of the harsh economic reality following the wars of the 1990s. For a while, I felt slightly uncomfortable, seeing myself as an outsider playing the role of a scientist. Now, I am convinced that science is one of the most exciting paths one can follow. I realize that scientists and artists are often cut from the same cloth, using different approaches to understand life. This may be particularly true in neuroscience, which I chose as my focus. Even without a scientific background, one can easily appreciate many of the questions asked in this field  — what does it mean to feel something, what drives us, why do we have to sleep every night? One of my hobbies is taking photographs of great works of art that have sleep as their theme. Chances are that your favorite artist is in my collection.
University of Basel, Switzerland
Appointed in 1984
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University of Basel, Switzerland
Appointed in 1984
Yale University
Appointed in 1991
University of California, Berkeley
Appointed in 1997
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University of California, Berkeley
Appointed in 1997
Princeton University
Appointed in 1989
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 2005
Washington University in St. Louis
Appointed in 1980
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Washington University in St. Louis
Appointed in 1980
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Appointed in 1982
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Appointed in 1982
Boston Children's Hospital
Appointed in 2002
Carnegie Institute for Science
Appointed in 1984
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Appointed in 1977
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Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Appointed in 1977
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 1958
Stanford University
Appointed in 1965
California Institute of Technology
Appointed in 2008
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California Institute of Technology
Appointed in 2008
I am interested in how commensal bacteria influence the development of the intestinal immune system  and their impact on disease.
Bacterial organisms residing within our bodies outnumber our own cells by an order of magnitude. We are often taught that bacteria cause disease and that our immune systems function to recognize and eradicate them. However, commensal bacteria do not make us sick and our immune systems tolerate their presence. My postdoctoral research is directed at understanding why we allow these bacteria to live with us. We have shown that colonization by one of these commensal organisms  has beneficial consequences for its host as it can protect from  development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). As 30 percent of IBD patients develop colonic cancer, colonization by beneficial bacteria might also serve as a potential cancer preventive. Additionally, in studying this bacterium we have uncovered novel mechanisms by which our bodies detect and tolerate bacteria. Understanding what organisms live within our bodies and deciphering how they individually influence the development of immune responses could ultimately lead to the creation of therapies to treat multiple human diseases.
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 1990
University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 2010
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University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 2010
University of California, Berkeley
Appointed in 2016
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University of California, Berkeley
Appointed in 2016
The goal of my postdoctoral research is to discover essential regulatory mechanisms that control neural developmental programs and cell fates in a complex organism. Abnormal neural development is central to many pediatric diseases and the source of many cancers originating in the nervous system. Development requires precise signaling pathways to facilitate cell-cell communication and maintain normal function and prevent disease. Thus, I propose to study neural development in Xenopus tropicalis embryos, an established model system, and identify evolutionarily conserved complexes in human embryonic stem cells undergoing neuronal differentiation. A small modifying protein, ubiquitin is an important part of regulatory pathways that control nearly every aspect of cell physiology and is frequently perturbed in cancer. Recent work has demonstrated that ubiquitin modification is an essential regulator of development and cell fate. I will use combination of genetic, proteomic, biochemical, and cell biology techniques to identify crucial ubiquitin complexes and reveal the molecular mechanism of neural differentiation programs. Together, this work will provide unprecedented insight into the regulation of early embryonic differentiation programs and reveal therapeutic avenues to treat human cancers.
Harvard University
Appointed in 2008
Current Research: Probing gene expression in live eukaryotic cells at single molecule level
I majored in biotechnology and biochemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India and joined the biophysics and computational biology graduate program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001.  I received my doctorate in 2007 for my work on understanding the mechanism of various proteins involved in replication and transcription using in vitro single molecule techniques in the Taekjip Ha laboratory. I am currently a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Sunney Xie.  My current research interests are twofold: 1) development of novel optical imaging techniques to probe the behavior of single biomolecules in live eukaryotic cells; and 2) implementation of single-molecule imaging to understand cellular gene expression and cell-fate determination. My efforts are geared towards extending the usefulness of single molecule techniques to mainstream biology.
University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 2013
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University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 2013
I am interested in both the general biochemical principles that govern cellular signaling and the development of synthetic biology approaches to control complex signaling networks and cellular behavior. These interests are complimentary as synthetic biology is often informed by knowledge obtained from studying natural cellular signaling mechanisms refined by evolution. In Wendell Lim¬ís lab at UCSF, I am using this two-pronged approach to engineer new receptors and signaling networks to control the activity and behavior of therapeutic T cells. Such engineered multi-layered regulation of cellular activity — an important characteristic of naturally occurring biological systems — has the potential to make cell-based therapeutics safer and more effective, a critical concern for this burgeoning therapeutic approach.
I grew up in Louisiana, moved to Texas for undergrad and received my Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (UTSW) in January 2013. There I studied fundamental cellular and biochemical mechanisms that regulate T cell activation at the systems-scale in Christoph Wülfing’s lab. Before graduate school, I did a wide-range of research. One of my major contributions was in Colleen McClung’s lab in the Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at UTSW where I characterized the first mouse model resembling human mania caused by disruption of the circadian rhythm transcription factor, Clock. Outside of lab, I enjoy biking, climbing, and exploring the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sidney Farber Cancer Institute
Appointed in 1978
Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago
Appointed in 1958
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Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago
Appointed in 1958
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Appointed in 1974
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Appointed in 1974
Harvard University Medical School
Appointed in 2001
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Harvard University Medical School
Appointed in 2001
Stanford University
Appointed in 1986
The University of Texas at Austin
Appointed in 2024
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The University of Texas at Austin
Appointed in 2024
The international outbreak of mpox (monkeypox) in 2022 incited global health concerns and underscored the need for an innovative vaccine. However, little is known about potential vaccine targets within the causative orthopoxvirus, mpox virus.
Dr. Emily Rundlet will explore the structure and function of potential mpox vaccine targets in Dr. Jason McLellan’s lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Rundlet will structurally characterize antigen complexes using cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography, which will enable her to probe their function in the viral lifecycle and design vaccine candidates. In sum, Dr. Rundlet’s work is expected to provide valuable insights into mpox biology and pave the way for future mpox vaccines.
Dr. Rundlet developed her expertise in structural biology in Dr. Scott Blanchard’s lab at Weill Cornell Medicine. During her graduate studies, Dr. Rundlet used cryo-EM and single-molecule FRET assays to make important discoveries about protein translation. With these methods, Dr. Rundlet elucidated how the ribosome initiates movement of tRNAs during protein synthesis and demonstrated that mRNA decoding by ribosomes is kinetically and structurally different in humans and bacteria. Now Dr. Rundlet is using her expertise to uncover the structural secrets of orthopoxviruses to guide vaccine design and prevent future outbreaks.
Duke University
Appointed in 1997
University of Sussex, England
Appointed in 1983
University of California, San Diego
Appointed in 1984
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University of California, San Diego
Appointed in 1984
Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Appointed in 1973
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Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Appointed in 1973
Massachusetts General Hospital
Appointed in 2001
Harvard University Medical School
Appointed in 2020
Ultraconserved elements (UCEs) are a set of DNA sequences that exhibit perfect conservation across the genomes. I learned of UCEs and their putative role in maintaining genome integrity at a seminar by Dr. Chao-ting Wu. Scattered across genomes, unique, and 200bps or greater in length, UCEs have remained unchanged for over 300 million years. Yet, their extreme sequence conservation is still a mystery. Although my Ph.D. training is in the DNA repair field, I decided to join Dr. Chao-ting’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher and explore the biology of UCEs. Previous studies have demonstrated that UCEs can contain transcription factor binding motifs an function as enhancers to regulate tissue-specific transcription. However, no regulatory or proteincoding functions can explain such extreme sequence conservation. My research will focus on testing a model that can explicitly address such an explanation. I hypothesize that homologous UCEs compare their sequences via pairing and any detected discrepancies in sequence or copy number will lead to cell death and/or disease onset. As a result, genome integrity would be maintained by culling out cells carrying deleterious rearrangements. I will assay this model with different approaches Рa) computational analyses, b) CRISPR-based genome editing, and c) imaging techniques. Ultimately, the potential of UCEs to sense and cull deleterious rearrangements genome-wide offers a unique yet intriguing and still largely unexplored potential general strategy for treating diseases derived from rearrangements, regardless of the etiology of diseases.
Stanford University
Appointed in 2004
New York University
Appointed in 2001
National Institutes of Health
Appointed in 1956
Massachusetts General Hospital
Appointed in 1995
Stanford University
Appointed in 1995
New York University
Appointed in 1966
Harvard University
Appointed in 1991
Instituto Superiore di Sanita, Italy /
Universite de Paris, France
Appointed in 1957
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Instituto Superiore di Sanita, Italy / Universite de Paris, France
Appointed in 1957
Scripps Research Institute
Appointed in 1999
Scripps Research Institute
Appointed in 2018
Piezo proteins are ion channels that sense mechanical force in various physiological pathways, including touch sensation, breathing, and vascular development. Mutations in Piezo cause diseases associated with mechanotransduction defects, including distal arthrogryposis and dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis. Piezos are unrelated to other known ion channels, and how they transduce mechanical force into channel opening remains unknown. As a joint postdoc in Andrew Ward and Ardem Patapoutian labs, I use cryo-electron microscopy and other biophysical approaches to gain a mechanistic understanding of Piezo function.”
University of Utah
Appointed in 1982
University of Oregon
Appointed in 1981
National Institutes of Health
Appointed in 1981
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National Institutes of Health
Appointed in 1981
University of Utah
Appointed in 2013
Computational modeling will be coupled with experiment to investigate the mechanism by which Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport (ESCRT)-III complexes remodel and sever membranes. The ESCRT pathway relates to cancer pathogenesis by: mediating downregulation of membrane-bound receptors; catalyzing the abscission stage of cytokinesis; and controlling exosome formation. Of the five essential core ESCRT complexes, the ESCRT-III complex uniquely encodes the membrane severing activity. ESCRT-III subunits form filaments that can bind membranes, selforganize into higher-order assemblies, and use these assemblies to constrict membranes and promote fission. Newly emerging cryo-EM reconstructions of ESCRT-III assemblies make it possible to create the first models of these systems that incorporate discrete subunit structures. Using these models, we will investigate: how these filaments form rings with different diameters; how membrane interactions and curvature affect filament structure; and how lateral interactions between adjacent filaments accommodate changes in curvature. Experimental measurements of the physical properties of wild type and mutant ESCRT-III filaments will be used to validate these models and test their predictive power. This integration of experiment and theory should identify, at a fundamental level, properties driving ESCRT-III-mediated membrane remodeling and fission.
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 1974
Rockefeller University
Appointed in 1975
University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 1995
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University of California, San Francisco
Appointed in 1995
University of Oxford, England
Appointed in 1987