Srinjoy was born and raised in Somerset County, NJ. His potential was recognized early as his premature mastery of the alphabet allowed him to skip kindergarten. As a result of multiple class trips to the Liberty Science Center as well as opportunities to engage in science outside of the classroom, Srinjoy’s academic interests gravitated towards biomedical research, and he went on to major in biochemistry at Columbia University. Having finished undergrad without a clear idea of how he wanted to fit in the biomedical research field in the long term, Srinjoy worked as a research technician in the labs of Drs. David Ting and Daniel Haber at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center to explore the medical side of research. As an NYU MSTP student Srinjoy hopes to integrate research on phase separation and the physical properties of the cell interior with our understanding of cancer on a molecular and cellular level. In his spare time, Srinjoy enjoys jamming on the piano, jamming board games, and jamming in general in all appropriate situations.

Sudarshan was raised in Bangalore, India and moved to the US for college. He did his undergraduate studies in Biology and Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and is currently a graduate student in the NYU Sackler program. A self described ‘tinkerer’,  he took Richard Feynman at his word when he said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” and is currently trying to engineer biological systems in order to understand their function. Sudarshan is passionate about soccer, heavy metal guitar, food and exposing everyone to the joys of a scientific worldview.

Dajun was born in a small town called Sihong in the middle of South China. He has come a long way to get here. He did his Ph. D. in the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences where he started with crop breeding, then moved on to study plant genetics and development. He did a brief post doc at the Institute for Agricultural Biosciences, Oklahoma State University. He is now studying the deep evolution of protein kinases and the phase separation of biomolecules. He is currently applying these principles for synthetic biology.

Greg grew up in Hunterdon County, NJ where his frequent interactions with wild animals such as deer and the population of the Jersey Shore led to an interest in how organisms can evolve to be so weird. He went on to attend Gettysburg College where he majored in Biochemistry and Molecular biology while also interning at Janssen Pharmaceuticals in the cancer research division. Greg is currently a Ph. D. candidate in the NYU Sackler program.

Greg is currently interested in how the physical nature of a cell’s interior is controlled and how aberrant signaling changes the physical properties of cells during cancer progression. These questions relate to how cells adapt to mechanical stresses.

Tamas was born and grew up in Budapest, Hungary. More precisely, on the right bank of the Danube in Buda. After finishing his BSc. and MSc. studies at the ELTE University in Budapest he moved to Heidelberg, Germany to pursue his PhD studies in the group of Sebastian Schuck at the Center for Molecular Biology (ZMBH). There he uncovered and characterized SHRED a novel stress response pathway in budding yeast. 

In July 2018 he joined the lab as a post-doctoral fellow. He has started to investigate the biophysical properties of the nucleus with a particular emphasis on macromolecular crowding. He will use his expertise in molecular biology, biochemistry and yeast genetics (and maybe in guitar playing and climbing) to understand how crowding is mechanistically regulated. 

Liam is from a small village in Blighty, a small Island in the North East Atlantic. He did cancer research in Madrid for a bit then a Ph. D. in the UCSF Tetrad program (highly recommended), was a Bowes Fellow at UC Berkeley and is now an Assistant Professor at NYU in the Institute for Systems Genetics.

Liam is interested in biological information processing, which can be thought about using the approaches of systems biology, quantitative cell biology, physics, cell biology, proteomics (and other omics) and science communication.

Here are some great members of the Holt lab from UC Berkeley and NYU

Morgan is from Rouen, the mighty capital of Normandy, France. He did his Ph. D. at the Curie Institute in Paris, and a first post doc at UC Berkeley (where he met Liam). He then came to do a post doc with us!

Morgan now has a PI position as a CNRS researcher in LAAS, Toulouse, France. His main research is focused on developing micro-devices to study how mechanical stresses and chemical signals couple to drive a specific phenotype. He studies some of these fundamental questions in yeast as a model system, and applies his findings to cancer. We will visit him frequently to collaborate on cassoulet. Don’t hesitate to contact him if you wish to know more! He’s recruiting, and he’s amazing. Check out his website here:

https://delarue-research.org

mdelarue@laas.fr

Ignacio was raised in Santiago de Chile. In Autumn 2010 he moved to Berkeley where he joined the Holt lab as a technician. A year later he was accepted to the Molecular and Cell Biology PhD program as Liam’s first graduate student.

Ignacio is deeply interested in cell biology and transcriptional control, he has now graduated and is a post-doc studying aging in Jessica Tyler’s lab at Weill Cornell.

Conor is from San Diego, California, where a particularly inspiring high school teacher ignited his interests in the physical principles underlying biology. He went on to undergraduate studies in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley where he worked with Liam on poly-glutamine length variation in fungi. He continued in the Holt Lab as a technician, researching the evolutionary plasticity of kinase specificity, work that led to the first big publication from the Holt lab! After a short excursion into cancer proteomics at the University of Copenhagen, he began his Ph. D. in the UCSF Tetrad program. He is now investigating the principles of protein quality control and membrane remodeling.

Conor is broadly interested in the study of molecular evolution as a means of understanding the way complex systems arise and function, and how these systems fail in aging and disease.

Christophe is originally from Aix en Provence in France. He started his Masters of Science at the ENSCBP (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie, de Biologie et de Physique) in Bordeaux, France, and finished it at UC Berkeley. Not in a rush to be back in France, he took on research positions in two labs at UC Berkeley, first in the Forte lab, and then he came to join us! He now works in the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries, still in the Bay Area where he helps to develop novel anti-cancer therapies.

Noemie grew up in a small city in the South of Paris. She is interested in genetics since her 8th grade. After high school, she get a bachelor's degree in medicine at Paris Descartes University. She then chose to enter a research career. So, she is currently doing a master's degree of genetics at Paris Diderot University. During her time in Holt Lab, she worked in the effects of compressive stresses on the pathogen Candida albicans. She is interested in different (to many) subjects as evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, microbiology and cell imaging."