Sasha Levy, Group Leader (2013-Present)

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Sasha did his undergraduate and Ph.D. research in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. In 2006, he moved to NYU to become a postdoctoral fellow with Mark Siegal. There, he focused on robustness and bet hedging in yeast. In 2011, he moved to Stanford University for a second postdoc with Gavin Sherlock. There he developed a genomic barcoding platform in yeast and used it to study early clonal dynamics and the adaptive spectrum in yeast. In 2013, Sasha started his own group at Stony Brook University, which in 2017 moved to Stanford to become a part of the Joint Initiative for Metrology in Biology. Sasha is interested in developing barcode sequencing as a platform technology, with a specific focus on new tools, methods, and controls that will make bar-seq a low-cost and replicable assay to study a large number of biological questions.

Xianan Liu, Associate Staff Scientist (2013-Present)

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Xianan performed his undergraduate studies in Biology at Nanjing Normal University, a Master's degree in Biophysics at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a second Master's in Environmental Health Science at NYU, and his PhD with Sasha at Stony Brook University. His PhD work focused on developing genomic barcoding technologies in yeast. Xianan continued in the lab as a staff scientist. He is currently developing a multiplexed in vivo DNA assembly technology.

Fangfei Li, PhD student (2013-Present)

Fangfei performed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics at Beijing Normal University and Master's in Mathematics at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests at the Chinese Academy of Sciences were focused on multi-agent systems theory. Her Ph.D. with Sasha is focused on understanding the patterns of epistasis between adaptive mutations and on analyses related of DNA barcode sequencing data.

Darach Miller, PostDoc (2018-Present)

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Darach's first forays into genetics used the haloarchaea NRC-1, first with a comparative genomic approach in the lab of Marc Facciotti at UC Davis, then developing Tn-Seq methods with Nitin Baliga at the ISB in Seattle. After leaving UC Davis with a BS in Genetics, he joined the NYU Biology PhD program to work with David Gresham on measuring mRNA destabilization transcriptome-wide during a nitrogen upshift and developing new combinations of technologies to directly estimate GAP1 mRNA clearance in pools of barcoded mutants. At JIMB Darach aims to continue developing and calibrating high-throughput assays to capture the full scope and dynamics of proteome organization in the cell, and to do so in terms relevant to our understanding of the underlying biochemistry.

Takeshi Matsui, PostDoc (2018-Present)

Takeshi did his undergraduate studies in Biology at Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, he joined Andrew McCallion’s lab as a research technician, where he worked with a team of graduate students and postdocs to identify transcription factor binding site combinations that explain and predict gene expression patterns. In 2011, he joined the University of Southern California Molecular Biology PhD program to work with Ian Ehrenreich. Takeshi’s research in his lab focused on dissecting the genetic architecture of complex traits and studying the background dependence of mutations. As a postdoc in Sasha Levy’s lab, Takeshi is currently developing a high-throughput technique capable of generating extremely large panels of barcoded yeast strains with known genotypes that can be phenotyped simultaneously in cell pools.

Kieran Collins, PostDoc, joint with Gavin Sherlock (2020-Present)

Kieran did his graduate work at UC Santa Cruz with Karen Ottemann, where he described how a cytoplasmic chemoreceptor named TlpD directed a chemotactic repellent response as Helicobacter pylori experienced oxidative stress and its impact during the early stages of infection in the stomach. He next worked with Fred Chang at UCSF where he studied how mitotic entry in fission yeast is delayed until cells have grown past a minimum size threshold. Kieran joined the Levy and Sherlock labs in February 2020 and is focused on develeping CRISPRi tools that enable comparative genetic interaction screening accross yeast species.

Weiyi Li, PostDoc (2020-Present)

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Weiyi did his undergraduate studies in Biology at China Agricultural University. After graduation, he joined the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior PhD program at Indiana University Bloomington to work with Michael Lynch. His research interests there focused on errors generated during the expression of genetic information. He developed a rolling-circle amplification-based sequencing method to identify low frequency errors in the transcriptome and to further understand the evolution of transcript-error rates under natural selection and genetic drift. Working with Sasha Levy as a postdoc, Weiyi aims to develop genetic tools for gene building, barcoding and high-throuputgene replacement in bacteria.

Po-Hsiang Hung, PostDoc, joint with Gavin Sherlock (2020-Present)

Po-Hsiang joined the Genomics and Systems Biology Ph.D. program at National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica, Taiwan in 2012. She worked with Dr. Jun-Yi Leu to study how a chaperone protein, Hsp90, regulates the revealing of genetic variation among wild yeast population. By combing the transcriptional factor binding site prediction and Hsp90-dependent gene expression profiles among yeast strains, she identified several strain-specific transcriptional factors that show Hsp90-dependent activity/abundance differences among strains and lead to Hsp90-dependent strain-pair specific expression deferences. Po-Hsiang joined the Levy and Sherlock labs in February 2020 and is focused on develeping CRISPRi tools that enable comparative genetic interaction screening accross yeast species.

Zhimin Liu, PhD student (2013-2020)

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Zhimin did his undergraduate and Master's studies in Harbin Institute of Technology and University of Sciences and Technology of China. In 2013, he became a Ph.D. student in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Stony Brook University. His main focus in the lab was to develop a high-throughput barcode-sequencing technology that quantifies how protein-protein interactions change in different environments. He is now a data scientist at Jansenn R&D.

Adam Dziulko, Technician (2016-2019)

Adam performed his undergraduate studies in Genetics at Iowa State University. There, he studied Schwann cell differentiation in the lab of Donald Sakaguchi and was awarded a DOE undergraduate intership. He was then awarded a second DOE undergraduate intership to study enhancer biology in the lab of Axel Visel at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. While in the Levy Lab, he worked on barcode-based genetic interactions and quantitative trait mapping. He is now a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jamie Blundell, Postdoc (2013-2017).

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Jamie trained as a theoretical physicist at the Cavendish laboratory, University of Cambridge with Eugene Terentjev studying the statistical physics of polymers. He worked with Sasha at Stanford University as a postdoc with Daniel Fisher, and later joined Sasha's lab, co-mentored by Daniel. While working with Sasha, he studied the lineage dynamics, adaptive spectrum, and diversity dynamics of clonal evolution in yeast. In 2017, he started his own group at the Cambridge Cancer Centre Early Detection program. His current research interests lie in quantitatively understanding somatic evolution in human tissues and using this understanding to detect cancer earlier.

Robert Morabito, Undergraduate and Master's student (2014-2016)

Robert joined the lab as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University and continued as a Master's student. While in the lab, he worked on building tools for barcode sequencing. He is currently a PhD student at Stony Brook University in the labs of David Matus and Ben Martin.

Emmanuel Ozuruonye, Undergraduate (2014).

Emmanuel started his education at Nassau Community College. While there, he joined the lab as part of the BioPREP program and worked on building bar-seq tools. After working in the lab, he moved to Columbia University to finish his undergraduate education in Neurobiology and Neurosciences. He has been working as a lab technician in New York, and is starting a Master's in Biotechnology at John's Hopkins in 2018.

Bertin Mathai, Undergraduate (2014-2015).

Bertin joined the lab as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University. While in the lab, he worked on building bar-seq tools. He is currently a medical student at Albert Einstein.

Danielle Francois, Technician (2016-2017).
Devon Lukow, Rotation Student (2016).
Wenbo Xu, Rotation Student (2016).
Thalia Cepeda, BioPREP Student (2016).
Frank Celest, Rotation Student (2015).
Richard Bennett, Technician (2013-2015)