Dan Dickinson 

Assistant Professor

Dan has been obsessed with cell polarity ever since graduate school, when he worked on epithelial polarity in Dictyostelium with Bill Weis and James Nelson at Stanford. After finishing his Ph.D. at Stanford, he was a postdoc in Bob Goldstein's lab at UNC Chapel Hill. 

Ryan Doonan

Research Educator, Assistant Professor of Practice

Ryan got his Ph.D. in a C. elegans lab at University College London and has extensive postdoc experience with worms. He is responsible for managing the Freshman Research Initiative stream that our lab is setting up. He also makes and manages most of our strains and helps keep the lab running smoothly.

Ivy Chang

Graduate Student

Ivy was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. She's working on two projects: One involving high-resolution imaging and manipulation of PAR-3 oligomers, and the other aimed at visualizing molecular structures in complex lysates. 

Nadia Manzi

Graduate Student

Nadia was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona where she worked on cancer cell invasion; she received a prestigious AMGEN scholarship while an undergrad. She's launching a new project exploring how cell cycle machinery influences the organization of the PAR system.

Yu Shi (Nicole)

Graduate Student

Yu studied medicine in China before shifting her focus to basic research.  She's working on dissecting mechanisms of polarity in mammalian cells, using stem cell derived organoid cultures. 

Yash Shukla

Graduate Student

Yash was an undergraduate in Hong Kong, where he worked with DNA Origami and aptamers.  He's excited about engineering, microfluidics, enzyme kinetics, and cool approaches to studying cells. Yash is currently working on developing a project that will use non-model nematodes to investigate how cell signaling machinery can evolve.

Naomi Stolpner

Graduate Student

Naomi was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, where she worked on Drosophila border cell migration in Denise Montell's lab. She's studying how novel PAR protein complexes are regulated both in the zygote and at later stages of development.

Jordan Brown

PostBac Researcher

Jordan graduated from UT with a Biology degree in 2019, and joined our lab to get some more research experience before applying to Ph.D. programs. She's working on generating a set of reporters to explore plasma membrane organization, an almost totally unexplored question in C. elegans.

Sena Sarikaya

PostBac Researcher

Sena graduated from UT in 2020, having spent 3 years as an undergraduate researcher studying convergent extension in John Wallingford's lab. She's working on making some technical improvements to our sc-SiMPull approach in order to enable us to study transient protein complexes that form during zygote polarization.

Alex Koh

Undergraduate Researcher

Alex is a UT Dean's Scholar. He is working to help identify new players in cell polarity in C. elegans. 

All are welcome

We're proud to be a team that includes people of diverse backgrounds. If you love worms, cells, molecules, microscopes or all of the above, You Belong Here.