Team

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.

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.

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.

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.

I completed a B.A. in Computer Science and Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley in May 2023 and joined the Sneddon Lab in October 2023. I like to play piano and basketball, watch birds in the baylands, and sleep.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raised in the burbs of Illinois, I’m a midwesterner at heart. For my undergrad, I got my B.A. in Neuroscience at Smith College. One of my first research experiences was at Smith in the Hall lab where I characterized the modulatory effects of novel anesthetics on neuronal receptors. However, throughout the years, my research interests have shifted from molecular neuroscience to genomics. In the fall of 2020, I moved to California as a student in the joint bioengineering graduate program at UC Berkeley-UCSF and later joined the Gartner lab. When I’m not in the lab you can find me hitting the gym, trying out new bars/breweries with friends, and looking for the next best kind of pizza (second to deep dish).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.