Paulina Salgado Marshall
Paulina was an undergraduate senior in the Bioengineering Dept. She worked with Dr. Ruoshi Yuan on biomolecular nanotechnology using fluidics and chips. She has gone to work in industry.
Dexter Lai
Dexter works with Dr. Bradley Biggs on the cloning and testing of genomic fragments into bacterial strains to test for the activity of unknown genes. This work is part of the broader ENIGMA goals of understanding the metagenomic data gathered at the site and improving our ability to move from metagenomic DNA to practical biological function of the microbial communities.
Heloise Carion
Heloise Carion was a fourth year Bioengineering undergraduate student at UC Berkeley with a concentration in synthetic and computational biology. Her interests include genetics, systems biology, and computation. In 2018, she joined the Arkin Laboratory, and has helped develop technology for high-throughput characterization of phage genes.
Ashley Azadeh
As of 2020, Ashley is a Scientist at Roche.
Yasha Ektefaie
As of 2020, Yasha is a PhD student at Harvard Medical School.
Alejandro Ramirez
Alejandro Ramirez was a Bioengineering Research Associate in the Arkin Laboratory at LBNL. He studied bioengineering, concentrating in synthetic biology and systems biology, and metabolic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019 he interned at Amyris, Inc. as a fermentation operations associate for tanks sized 250 mL to 2.0 L before starting full-time at Endless West as a production associate in the creation of beverages and food from component chemicals. As his passion was still in synthetic biology, Alejandro returned to work for the Arkin Lab in 2020 joining the ENIGMA project under the supervision of Vivek Mutalik. His interests in science are in sustainable engineering, biological interactions, and genetic tools used in directed-evolution.
Morgan Price
Thanks to cheap DNA sequencing, we are slowly starting to understand the incredible diversity of bacteria. Morgan Price builds computational tools to help us use all this data to understand how diverse bacteria work. This understanding can help us manage our environment, control the bacteria inside us, and develop new biotechnologies.
Drew Hendrickson
Drew Hendrickson was a researcher with the Arkin Lab at LBNL. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2019 with his B.S. in Chemical Biology and Microbial Biology with a focus in environmental and ecological microbiology. Previously, Drew worked in bioremediation to elucidate the microbial transformations of hydrocarbon contaminants by using advanced mass spectrometry and sequencing techniques. He is interested in systems biology, data science, and “-omics” to understand our microbial world. Since joining the ENIGMA team, he employs improved sequencing techniques to study novel microbes from diverse environments. Outside of the lab, he enjoys dance, LGBTQ advocacy, and hiking across the California landscape.
Jennifer Kuehl
Jennifer Kuehl is a staff research associate that has worked for LBNL since 2002. She graduated from the University of Missouri- St.Louis with a BS in Biology. After graduation she drove to California for a vacation and stayed to start a life there. Her career at the lab started at the Joint Genome Institute in the Sanger sequencing production line as they were completing the human genome. She then transferred to the evolutionary genomics group at the JGI where the research was focused on using plasmids genomes for reconstructing the evolutionary history of everything from lettuce to worm lizards to stony corals to stalk eyed flies. In 2008, she started in the Arkin lab constructing a barcoded mutant library in the non-model sulfate reducing bacteria, Desulfovibrio alaskensis G20 for improving gene annotations. Currently she is working on pipeline to identify microbial interactions important for fitness in a given growth condition using high throughput enrichment culturing and 16s amplicon community sequencing. She feels fortunate to be able to work with and develop friendships with so many interesting Berkeley students from around the world.
Fangchao Song
Fangchao Song is a postdoctoral fellow in Arkin Lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is working on droplet-based high throughput method to reveal bacterial interactions in complex microbial community and profile the microbial physiology in different nutrients and environments, under the project of Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies (ENIGMA). Before joining the lab, Fangchao was a graduate student working on mathematical modeling of polymerization and biodegradable polymer manufacturing. In 2010, he started a new journey in the microbiology world during his Ph.D research on microbial biofilms and their antibiotic resistance. Since then, he is fascinated by the complexity and orderliness of microbiome, and enthusiastic about designing new method by combining experiments and modeling to better understand the function and dynamics of microbiome. Fangchao obtained his B.S. from Shandong University in 2003, M.S. from Zhejiang University in 2010, and Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2016, all in Chemical Engineering. He wants to be a researcher and educator in the future.
