People

Leor Weinberger, PhD

Professor
Biochemistry And Biophysics

Weinberger and colleagues discovered the HIV latency circuit (Weinberger* et al. Cell 2005), which provided the first experimental evidence that stochastic fluctuations (‘noise’) in gene expression drive biological fate decisions. Noise-driven decisions were then found in systems ranging from bacteria to cancer. The lab's studies overturned dogma in the field by showing that HIV latency was a ‘hardwired’ virus program (Razooky et al. Cell 2015; Rouzine et al. Cell 2015) and discovered stochastic latency programs in other viruses (Chaturvedi et al. PNAS 2020).

Lani Wu, PhD

Professor
Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Dr. Lani Wu is interested in discovering principles underlying cellular individuality, the emergence of collective cellular behaviors, and the evolution of drug resistance. She also applies the high-throughput technology developed by her laboratory to diverse applications, including mapping paths of signal transduction and accelerating drug discovery. Prior to arriving at UCSF, Dr. Wu has worked at the UT Southwestern, Harvard University, Rosetta Informatics, Microsoft, and Princeton University.

Steven Altschuler, PhD

Professor
Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Dr. Steven Altschuler is interested in discovering principles underlying cellular individuality, the emergence of collective cellular behaviors, and the evolution of drug resistance. Dr. Altschuler also applies high-throughput technology developed by his laboratory to diverse problems, including mapping paths of signal transduction and accelerating drug discovery. Prior to arriving at UCSF, Dr. Altschuler worked at UT Southwestern, Harvard, Rosetta Informatics, Microsoft, Princeton, and the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Benoit Bruneau, PhD

Professor In Residence
Pediatrics

The main focus of our lab is to understand how a heart becomes a heart: what cell lineage decisions take place to direct cardiac differentiation, and what morphogenetic and patterning processes occur to assemble all of the heart's components into a functional organ. We are primarily interested in regulation of these processes by transcriptional regulatory mechanisms that include DNA-binding transcription factors, chromatin remodeling complexes, and histone modifications.

Bruce Conklin, MD

PROF IN RES-FY
Medicine

We are developing new genome engineering methods in human iPS cells to identify therapeutic targets in cardiac disease. We are using these same tools to develop strategies for therapeutic genome editing. The combination of human iPS cells and genome editing provide unprecedented opportunities to explore new areas of biology and discover new therapies for disease.

Hana El-Samad, PhD

ADJ PROF-FY
Biochemistry And Biophysics

Our lab is interested in interdisciplinary research at the interface of cellular biology, dynamical systems modeling, and control theory.

Zev Gartner, PhD

Professor
Pharmaceutical Chemistry

The human body contains over 10 trillion cells spanning hundreds of morphologically distinct cell types. These cells must work together for our bodies to function correctly. However, it remains a mystery how such an enormous diversity of cells coordinate their behaviors.

Anatol Kreitzer, PhD

Assoc Prof in Residence
Business Service Ctr

Areas of Investigation
The research in our laboratory is focused on understanding the mechanisms controlling cellular, synaptic, and circuit function in the basal ganglia that control motor planning, learning, and movement. Our long-term goal is to understand how neural activity and plasticity in these circuits shapes motor behavior and how neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and Huntington's disease (HD) affect synaptic, cellular, and circuit function in the basal ganglia.

Katie Pollard, PhD

Professor in Residence
Epidemiology & Biostatistics

The Pollard lab develops statistical and computational methods for the analysis of massive biomedical datasets. Our research focuses on emerging technologies for genomics, mass spectrometry, and imaging. We specialize in evolutionary and comparative approaches, including machine-learning integration of diverse types of data and longitudinal models of dynamics in disease and development. Examples of current projects are massively parallel dissection of regulatory networks and decoding cryptic variation in the human microbiome.

Deepak Srivastava, MD

Professor
Pediatrics

Our laboratory focuses on understanding the causes of heart disease and on using knowledge of cardiac developmental pathways to devise novel therapeutic approaches for human cardiac disorders. Specifically, we study the molecular events regulating early and late developmental decisions that instruct progenitor cells to adopt a cardiac cell fate and subsequently fashion a functioning heart. We focus on transcriptional and post-transcriptional steps, including those involving microRNAs.

Jonathan Weissman, PhD

Professor
Cellular Molecular Pharmacology

Our laboratory is looking at how cells ensure that proteins fold into their correct shape, as well as the role of protein misfolding in disease and normal physiology. We are also developing experimental and analytical approaches for exploring the organizational principles of biological systems and globally monitoring protein translation through ribosome profiling.