The people:
I hold a Ph.D from Stanford University in Molecular Pharmacology and a B.S. from University of California Davis in Genetics. As it relates to my work, my passion is to understand how mammary progenitor cell fate decisions and tissue organization are choreographed, and how does it all change during the aging process.
A UCB Department of Comparative Biochemistry PhD candidate. Holds an M.S. from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming University. Currently studies microenvironmental determinants of drug response durability.
Graduate Students
Fanny holds an MS from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Currently she studies age-dependent cell fate decisions in human mammary stem cells.
Professional science personnel
Postdoctoral fellow(s)
Holds her PhD from Harvard University where she studied chromatin regulation and other epigenetic factors in the context of pediatric cancers. Currently she is studying the role of chromatin modifying enzymes in aging-related breast cancers.
Holds his PhD from Konan University in Japan. He is expert in chromatin organization and his current project is exploring the role of epigenetic regulatory mechanisms in microenvironment directed cell fate decisions and maintenance.
A Molecular Environmental Biology graduate at UC Berkeley. By day, our resourceful research assistant, by night, he investigates the role of the age-related breast microenvironment in drug responses.
Jim holds his PhD from MIT, and is an expert in HMEC cell culture and immortalization. And there is a distinct possibility that he may actually know everything.
Established the methods by which most labs today grow normal human mammary epithelial cells (HMEC), and established the HMEC Bank. An expert in cell culture and immortalization.
Close collaborators
Undergraduate volunteers
Diana Guo:
Holds a B.S. in Integrative Biology with honors from UC Berkeley. Performed her undergraduate honors thesis research characterizing mammosphere-forming activity in normal HMEC as a function of age. Currently working as a research associate at UCSF.
Lea Chanson:
Holds a M.S. in Bioengineering from Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne. Conducted research to determine how the luminal and myoepithelial lineages of human mammary gland self-organize. As far as we know, working as a consultant for Alcimed Life Sciences.
Alumni
James Lorens (etal):
A Professor from University of Bergen in Norway whom we were fortunate to host for his sabbatical year. Jim is an expert in combinatorial biology with an emphasis on understanding the role of the Axl receptor tyrosine kinase in...well, just about everything. Don’t let the serious picture fool you, he is a very jocular fellow.
Klara Sputova:
Holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from UC Berkeley.
A blooming expert in establishing and maintaining pre-stasis finite lifespan HMEC strains, whose project explored telomere-length regulation as functions of age and lineage. She currently is negotiating her way through medical school at University of Florida
Ruby Fu:
A Molecular and Cellular Biology major UC Berkley. She studies aging-related changes in epigenetic regulation of specific genes. Mentored by Dr. Mora-Blanco
Monica Hellesoy and Henriette Ertsas:
Are PhD candidates from the University of Bergen who we have been lucky enough to host in the lab. They both are using our technologies (and bringing some of their own too) to study different aspects of context-dependent signaling.
Eric Chang:
An Integrative Biology major at UC Berkeley, and co-author on our 2013 Genome Integrity paper has moved on to Johns Hopkins to pursue an MPH.
Meredith Maimoni:
A Molecular and Cellular Biology major UC Berkley, Meredith is the recipient of a SULI award in 2012 from the US Department of Energy. She currently is studying the effects of aging on human mammary myoepithelial cells. Mentored by Dr. Garbe
