Team

Professor and Principal Investigator

415-514-9962
Office: GH-N512E

Originally from Santa Cruz, California, I received my BS in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1999, where I conducted undergraduate research in the laboratory of Y. K. Shin. I received a PhD in chemical biology from Harvard University in 2004 under the guidance of Professor David Liu, where I worked to develop DNA-templated synthesis as a strategy to build and evolve drug-like small molecules. In 2005 I returned to UC Berkeley for postdoctoral training with Professor Carolyn Bertozzi where I became interested in building tissues from cellular building blocks. I’m currently a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. My lab is honored to have our work acknowledged through the Kimmel Scholar Award, the NIH New Innovator Award, the Era of Hope Scholar Award from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Program, and the Popular Science Brilliant 10. I also codirect the NSF Center for Cellular Construction.

Zev's research

I’m interested in building with cells, i.e., living matter. Harnessing living matter as a building materials will open up a number of new opportunities. In human health, it will reveal new strategies to block diseases like aging and cancer, provide replacement tissues and organs for regenerative medicine, and establish new models of human physiology for the testing of therapeutics. Beyond human health, one can imagine living materials impacting areas as diverse as agriculture, construction, and environmental engineering. However, truly harnessing living matter requires a detailed understanding of the principles of self-organization, as well as new tools for measuring the properties of single cells and their interactions. My lab focuses its efforts in these areas.

Undergraduate Research Associate

I was born in Long Beach and raised in the Bay Area. I am in my senior year at UC Berkeley, pursuing an undergraduate degree in bioengineering. My research journey started at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where I studied microorganisms involved in carbon recycling. After taking a bioprinting course, my focus shifted to tissue engineering. I joined the Gartner lab as a summer intern and now work as an undergraduate research assistant. In my free time, I enjoy playing tennis, rewatching Supernatural, or riding roller coasters like Six Flags' Boomerang.

Jasmine's research

I am interested in understanding and controlling how bioprinted tissues structurally evolve in time. In collaboration with the Healy Lab at UC Berkeley, we are investigating the active mechanics of living inks and how these properties can be programmed to build tissues with desired shapes and interfaces.

Bryan's research

I am interested in applying ML and graph computational methods on 3D confocal images of intact islets to understand how islet structure regulates their function.

Lab Manager/Research Associate

Visit my LinkedIn

I was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District, where I had a very colorful childhood which included dancing Flamenco and Samba weekly, lots of boogie boarding down the coast, and visiting all the zoos and aquariums the Bay Area had to offer. So when it came time to choosing a university, I decided to stay close to home and study Animal Biology at the University of California, Davis. While there and in community college, I discovered my passion for research. In conjunction with the San Francisco Zoo, I had the opportunity to do behavioral research on their African Lions and Grizzly Bears. When I’m not working in the lab, you can find me at PhotoWorks developing film, going to farmer’s markets to buy ingredients for whatever TikTok recipe I found that week, or hanging out in my garden with my son.

Gabriela's research

I am excited to be working in the Gartner Lab on mammary gland research and how the plasticity differs in different mammal models.

Tetrad Graduate Student

Tetrad website
Visit my X profile
Visit my LinkedIn profile
Office: GH-N542

California-born, -raised, and -schooled. I grew up in the Bay Area and then migrated south to spend 4 years getting my B.S. in Cell & Developmental Biology at UCSB. I got into research there by joining the Rothman Lab, where I worked on various C. elegans projects. From there I came right back to the Bay Area to start as a Tetrad student at UCSF, and I officially joined the Gartner Lab in 2018. When I’m not working, I’m usually hanging out with my dog Fynn, cooking, looking for new music, grabbing a (few) beer(s) with friends, or wasting time learning useless trivia on Reddit.

Danny's research

In my time so far in the Gartner Lab, I’ve worked on both developing methods for single-cell omics and also studying how cancer genes alter tissue structure.

Researcher

415-476-6251
Office: GH-N544

I grew up on a farm in the corn belt west of Chicago and earned my undergraduate degree in biology at Northern Illinois University. After a short stint as a high school science teacher I returned to graduate school and received my PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I did post-graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and have been a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1994.

Jim's research

I am focused on normal human mammary epithelial cells and the intrinsic and extrinsic changes that lead to immortal and malignant transformation. This has included introducing defined genetic changes into normal HMEC to create new cell lines. In the Gartner Lab I will use DNA directed assembly to examine how different cell types and altered cell functions affect breast cancer related processes.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Visit my Google Scholar profile
Visit my X profile

I grew up in the California desert, where the environment fostered a love of both art and science. While studying chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, I found that research allowed me to pursue science as a creative endeavor. From there, I followed my namesake to Austin, Texas, to pursue my PhD in the Keitz Lab, developing living materials that dynamically respond to their environment, similar to tissues. Outside of the lab, you can find me skiing, playing tennis, at a concert, or exploring all that California has to offer.

Austin's research

Building on this foundation at the cell-material interface, in the Gartner Lab I develop materials and technologies that instruct tissue morphogenesis for improving our models of development, regeneration, and disease.

Bioengineering Graduate Student

Visit my LinkedIn profile
Bioengineering website
Office: GH-N546

Growing up in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, I flew across the country to study materials science and engineering for my undergrad and then computer science for my master’s at Stanford University. I greatly enjoyed research opportunities working on printable batteries for low-cost scanning electron microscopes (aweSEM) in Professor Manu Prakash’s Lab and developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to augment teaching ability in Professor Chris Piech’s Lab for CS Education. My industry experience has also been eye-opening, allowing me to discover polymer 3D-printing, aerospace technology, and computational materials modeling. In my free time I enjoy singing with the UCSF Vocal Chords a cappella group, hiking and camping in the Bay Area’s great outdoors, playing board games, and exploring the world with friends!

Grace's research

I’m very grateful to have found two homes by being co-advised in the labs of Professor Zev Gartner at UCSF and Professor Grace Gu (yes—crazy name coincidence!) at UC Berkeley. My research interests lie at the nexus of computational design and 3D-bioprinting to advance tissue engineering for regenerative medicine.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Office: GH-N546

I was born in East Lansing, Michigan, but I mostly grew up in South Korea. I received a bachelor's degree in biological science and electrical engineering (double major) from KAIST. I completed my doctoral studies at DGIST, focusing on single-molecule biophysics using nanomaterials, under the guidance of Dr. Daeha Seo and Jong-Chan Lee. In the Spring of 2024, I joined UCSF as a postdoc to investigate the underlying principles of cell-cell interface formation with Dr. Zev Gartner and Young-Wook Jun as my co-advisors.

Wonhee's research

My research interests center on the biophysical mechanisms behind the self-organization of cells driven by cellular machinery. Building on my previous research on the dynamic self-assembly of membrane proteins, I aim to investigate the biophysical mechanisms of complex interactions between cadherin proteins and actomyosin networks, which play a critical role in tissue patterning. Additionally, I am interested in incorporating advanced omics and machine learning techniques into my research projects.

Biophysics Graduate Student

Office: GH-N542

Born in SF and raised in Oakland, I took a break from California to study physics and math at Washington University (in St Louis). In the Mukherji Lab at WashU I worked on organelle size control and learned that my imagination is provoked more by biology than the problems of traditional physics. This led me to UCSF's Biophysics program, so I returned to the Bay Area to continue developing my imagination of the physics of biology in the Gartner Lab. Outside of the lab you'll find me applying the same physics to pottery.

Asa's research

I am interested in a physical definition of the cell. I love cells because they are both complex living systems and simple building blocks. I'm using ideas from physics, in particular statistical mechanics, to characterize the cell's identity in terms of its parts and their interactions. My goals are to learn basic biology and make cell engineering simple.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Visit my LinkedIn profile
Office: GH-N546

Raised in Southern California, I worked for a few years as an automotive mechanic before falling in love with engineering problems in biology. This fascination carried me to UCLA, where I completed an undergraduate degree in Bioengineering, working on mechatronics projects in Jacob Schmidt's lab, and mechanosensitive drug delivery in Ben Wu's lab. I continued on to a PhD with Ingmar Riedel-Kruse at Stanford/UofA, where I primarily worked on interactive biotechnology and synthetic multicellular patterning problems. Afterwards, I joined some friends to help build up Enable Medicine, a spatial-biology startup in the Bay Area, before returning to academia as a post-doc in the Gartner Lab.

Honesty's research

I am interested in how living things get their shapes and patterns. To satisfy this curiosity, I am applying multi-disciplinary and multi-scale approaches to coax living matter into predictably organizing, and to understand the principles that facilitate these processes.

Lauren's research

My work in the Gartner lab aims to utilize newfound spatial transcriptomic technologies like multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) to tackle questions related to abnormal gene expression profiles found in the cells that make up normal and diseased mammary glands.

I was born and raised in Orange County. I earned my bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at UCR where I developed a passion for research in the Murn lab studying RNA-binding proteins. Outside of lab, I love to explore a variety of interests including thrifting, plants, my ball python (her name is Boba), dancing, and exploring farmer’s markets and grocery stores.

Jennifer's research

How the microenvironment influences cell type plasticity in the mammary gland.

Tetrad Graduate Student

Visit my LinkedIn profile
Tetrad website
Office: GH-N544

Born and raised in southern California, I stayed local and pursued my undergraduate studies at UCLA. While there, I majored in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics which really gave me a deep dive into human biology. Aside from classes, I was very involved in undergraduate research in the lab of Dr. Gomperts where I studied stem cell homeostasis in the regenerating and aging airway. While at UCLA, I also discovered how much I liked to try new foods, visit local parks, and have a ‘city girl’ life.

Kimberly's research

Wanting to keep living the ‘city girl’ life, I decided to travel north to UCSF for my PhD studies. At UCSF I joined the lab of Dr. Gartner where I am studying the cellular structure of pancreatic islets using lab-generated protocols. I plan to translate acquired quantitative data about islet structure to better engineer human embryonic stem-cell derived pancreatic islets to treat patients with Type 1 diabetes.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Office: GH-N546
Office: GH-N542

I grew up in Changzhou, China, and earned my Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University, where I conducted research in Dr. Lingdong Kong’s lab. I later pursued a Master’s in Biotechnology at University of Pennsylvania, where I developed a passion for “coding to decode biology” after taking Dr. Junhyong Kim’s bioinformatics course.

During my PhD, co-advised by Dr. Kim and Dr. Kai Tan, I developed several computational tools to uncover hidden patterns in single-cell sequencing data. My work includes generating a lineage-resolved molecular atlas of C. elegans embryogenesis, mapping pre-hematopoietic stem cell formation from endothelium, and identifying novel tumor-macrophage interactions in colorectal cancer.

Currently, I’m a CRI Immuno-informatics Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Zev Gartner’s lab, enjoying a balance of both “dry” and “wet” lab work, as well as fishing at the beautiful San Francisco Bay.

Qin's research

I’m developing machine learning and bioinformatics tools to map the complex paths cells take to reach different states and to understand how these paths are altered by perturbations. By decoding the pharmacological “programming language” of immune cells, particularly T cells, my research aims to uncover strategies to “reprogram” them, enhancing their ability to effectively eliminate cancer cells.

Former lab members

Who	Now
Justin Farlow	Cofounder, Serotiny
Jennifer Liu	Scientist, Plexxicon
Alec Cerchiari	Scientist, Cook Medical
Noel Jee	Partner, Novo Holdings
Michael Todhunter	Founder, Dragonase
Samantha Liang	Director of Alliances and Collaborations, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy
Kade Southard	Research Scholar, Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute
Rob Weber	Medical Resident, UCSF
Andrew Bremer	Program Officer, National Academy of Sciences
Amanda Paulson	ADAM Fellow, NIH
Jesse Zhang	Scientist, Fluent BioSciences
Katie Cabral	Senior Scientist, GC Therapeutics
Jennifer Hu	Scientist, UPSIDE Foods
Chris McGinnis	Postdoc, Satpathy Lab (Stanford)
Hikaru Miyazaki	Scientist, Gordian Biotechnology
Kyle Broaders	Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Mount Holyoke
Chithra Krishnamurthy	Office of Technology Commercialization, UT Austin
Alex Hughes	Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, UPenn
David Patterson	Chemistry Technology Development, 10x Genomics
Lyndsay Murrow	Senior Scientist, Genentech
Melanie Bocanegra	Assistant Dean, Santa Monica College
Matthias Lachner	VFI
Max Coyle	Graduate Student, King Lab (Berkeley)
Nick Selden	Medical Student, UCSF
Alejandro Ramirez-Apodaca	Purigen
Efren Reyes	Genentech
Olivia Creasey	Leica
Gabrielle Rabadam	23andMe

Team

Team

Zev Gartner, PhD

Zev's research

Jasmine Amaya

Jasmine's research

Bryan Chang

Bryan's research

Gabriela Childree

Gabriela's research

Danny Conrad

Danny's research

Jim Garbe

Jim's research

Austin Graham

Austin's research

Teemu Hakkinen

Grace Hu

Grace's research

Tyler Huycke

Wonhee John Lee

Wonhee's research

Ali Kalantari

Asa Kalish

Asa's research

Honesty Kim

Honesty's research

Lauren Kim

Lauren's research

Jennifer Le

Jennifer's research

Iain Martyn

Kimberly Meneses

Kimberly's research

Brittany Moser

Kiet Phong

Vasudha Srivastava

Qin Zhu

Qin's research

Former lab members