Principal Investigator
John is a Professor in the Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology. He joined UC Davis in the summer of 2013.
Graduate Students
Christi is a graduate student (2021- ) in the BMCDB graduate group and is a MCB T32 trainee. Christi obtained her undergraduate degree from UC Davis in Genetics. She went on to work for a vaccine biotech startup, Dynavax, in Berkeley, California for 5 years, studying Th1 to Th2 switch using DNA adjuvants. In 2018 she joined the Botchan lab at UC Berkeley as a Research Associate, studying the initiation of DNA replication. She joined the BMCDB graduate group at UC Davis in 2021. She is studying the alternating phases of oxidative phosphorylation at the single cell level.
Elijah is a graduate student in the BMCDB graduate program, studying the complex web of signaling pathways that cells use to regulate their behavior in stressful environments. Starting his research career as a computational chemist at Skidmore College, Elijah transitioned to wet lab work after his graduation. After spending several years in Boston learning cloning and protein engineering techniques, he moved to California to pursue his PhD. Specifically, he is attempting to understand when and how cells regulate the formation of stress granules, liquid-liquid phase separations that compartmentalize important cellular components to protect and process them.
Marion is a graduate student in the BMCDB graduate group. She is Belgo-French and completed her BS in Biomedical Sciences and MS in Cancer at UCLouvain, in Brussels. She spent a year as a bioinformatician in an immunology-focused lab at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR). In March of 2024, she joined the Albeck lab and is interested in using and combining live-cell imaging with cycIF and scRNAseq to predict macrophage behavior in basal and disease conditions. You can check out Marion’s various projects on Github (https://github.com/marionhardy)!
Nick is a PhD candidate in the BMCDB graduate group and is a UC Davis Lung Center T32 trainee (2020-2022). Nick’s work includes studying the increase of spatially localized ERK activity in response to pro-inflammatory cytokines in the airway epithelium with support from Daniel Oberbauer. He also built the first Red-FRET AMPK biosensor (RAMPKAR2), with the help of Markhus Cabel. Currently, Nick has began working on a project looking at the role of cytokine-mediated ERK activity on airway smooth muscle contraction.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Madhura Patankar is Postdoctoral Scholar with an extensive background in Cancer and Translational Research. She is developing quantitative models of cellular communication in disease progression and therapeutic response. She joined the lab in March 2022, with a PhD in Experimental Pathology and Cancer Biology from University of Oulu, Finland.
Staff
Michael is an Assistant Project Scientist, specializing in systems and computational biology. His work emphasizes accelerating the pace of research through computational tools, parsimonious modeling, and by better quantifying biological measurements. He joined the lab in 2014, with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University.
Carolyn is a part-time assistant project scientist and lab manager who joined the Albeck lab in 2014. She received her doctorate from Duke University, did postdoctoral research at UC Irvine and taught at Florida State before moving to Davis. She has broad interests in biology including functional morphology, biomechanics, and developmental and cell biology.
Daniel is an Assistant Specialist and supports the lab’s data processing pipeline and other computational needs. He is currently supporting Nick DeCuzzi’s research by bringing Automated Recognition of Collective Signalling (ARCOS) to MATLAB. He is also helping to develop “Time Series Clustering”, a machine learning project that learns from and clusters unlabeled experimental data. He’s also interested in data sonification to make data more accessible.
Cuauhtemoc is a junior specialist who graduated UC Davis in 2022 with a BS in Biomedical Engineering, and specialized in cellular and tissue engineering. He is currently researching the EGFR signaling pathway and its response to various inhibitors with the goal of gaining a better understanding of how downstream pathways such as AKT, ERK, and TFEB react in accordance to EGFR inhibition. He hopes to apply this understanding of normal EGFR activity by comparing it to mutated EGFR responses commonly found in non-small lung cell cancers (NSCLC’s). Ultimately, his goal is to identify and categorize nuances in downstream signaling responses attributed to growth and proliferation in these EGFR mutated cells.
Florene is a Junior Specialist who graduated from UC Davis in 2023 with a BS in Biotechnology. She worked for a year at Genentech as an intern on the Process Engineering team, providing technical support for small-scale cell culture experiments in scaled-down bioreactors. She is currently assisting Elijah Kofke on his research understanding the regulatory signaling patterns that induce stress granules, a cellular response to certain environmental stressors.
Jason is a Junior specialist who graduated in 2022 with a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a Quantitative Biology minor. He currently works with Devan Murphy on her research into the regulation and production of the cytokine IL-8 in human lung epithelial cells. He focuses on molecular cloning and cell culturing to help gather real-time data on the changes in IL-8 activity on individual cells. He also has frogs and a snake as pets.
Former Grad Students
Breanne Sparta
Breanne was a graduate student in the BMCDB graduate group. She studied how cells coordinate metabolism and growth. She is a postdoc in the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA.
Devan is a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. She completed her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She then worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 2 years before starting her DVM/PhD program at Davis. Currently she is working on her thesis in John Albeck’s lab studying immune signaling and cytokine production in lung epithelial cells.
Fun Fact: Devan is the lab record-holder for most amount of sushi eaten.
Nont Kosaisawe (2017 – 2022)
Nont is a Senior Systems Specialist at Genentech with interests in big data analysis and lab automation.
Taryn Gillies
Taryn is a graduate of BMCDB graduate group PhD program. Her research focused on how cells use MAPK dynamics to encode downstream gene expression changes. Taryn is currently a Bioinformatics Scientist at Nautilus Biotechnology and works on modeling
and image analysis.
Former Postdocs
Alexander Davies, 2015-2019
Alex is currently a Senior Scientist at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute’s Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center (CEDAR).
Didem Sarikaya, 2015-2020
Didem is currently a Senior Product Manager for 10x Genomics.
Former Staff
Markhus is a Junior Specialist using molecular and cell-culture techniques to perform and support various live-cell experiments under widefield fluorescence microscopy, as well as contributing to biosensor design and validation. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Cell Biology and Human Physiology in Spring 2020.