STARS 2022 - Research Project Descriptions

Colleen A. McHugh
The McHugh Lab is discovering new functions of long non-coding RNA in human cells. Our research projects are expanding our understanding of how RNA can bind and coordinate protein complexes to regulate gene expression and cell growth. We aim to reveal how RNA can control cellular functions in diseases like cancer and aging. Techniques that are used in our lab include molecular biology and cloning, bioinformatics, mass spectrometry, and protein structure determination by crystallography and electron microscopy.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://chemistry.ucsd.edu/faculty/profiles/mchugh__colleen__a.html 

Kimberly Prather
Kimberly Prather is a distinguished Professor at the UC San Diego Chemistry and Biochemistry Department and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Prather's research focuses on how human emissions are influencing the atmosphere, climate, and human health. The Prather group conducts research focused on improving our understanding of how humans are influencing our atmosphere and climate. In the early part of her career, Prof. Prather and her research group developed a unique method, aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometry (ATOFMS), for the on-line characterization of the size and chemical composition of atmospheric aerosols. Using ATOFMS and a wide array of other gas and particle instruments, the Prather group is now performing studies worldwide to better understand the role of aerosols in climate change. The ultimate goal of the group's research is to determine which aerosol sources play the largest role in affecting key atmospheric processes, including heterogeneous reactions, cloud formation, and ice nucleation.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://kprather.scrippsprofiles.ucsd.edu/research/ 

Nathan Romero 
Research in the Romero lab focuses on developing new synthetic methods for advanced polymeric materials. Our goal is to create sustainable polymers with high performance electrical, optical, and mechanical properties. This summer research project will give students the opportunity to synthesize new organic materials that undergo changes in properties when triggered by light, electricity, or other stimuli.
Prerequisites: Students are required to have taken general chemistry
Website: http://romeropolymerlab.ucsd.edu/

Claire Meaders
Claire Meaders is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Cell and Developmental Biology Section at UC San Diego. Her research is focused on the intersection of instructional practices and student experiences in STEM courses. A current project focuses on exploring transfer student experiences in the Division of Biology, specifically the relationships between faculty promotion of campus resources, student engagement with campus resources, and student outcomes such as sense of belonging on campus. This project will involve analyzing quantitative and qualitative student and faculty survey data, and can be done either in-person or remote.
Prerequisites: None.
Website: https://biology.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/cmeaders 

Julian Schroeder
Julian Schroeder is a distinguished Professor in Plant Sciences at UC San Diego. His research is directed at discovering the responses of plants to drought and climate change. His focus is on discovering the signal transduction mechanisms and the underlying signaling networks that mediate resistance to climate change-linked environmental stresses in plants, in particular drought and CO2 responses in plants. These environmental ("abiotic") stresses have substantial negative impacts on plant growth and crop yields. These environmental stresses are also relevant in reference to climate change and to maintaining crop growth and food production to meet the human needs of the growing world population. Research in Julian Schroeder's laboratory is using multidisciplinary approaches including genetics, genomics, cell signaling, physiological, proteomics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics towards uncovering the signal transduction network and receptors in plants that translate drought stress hormone reception and CO2 sensing to specific resistance responses in plants. Some of the recent research advances are being used in the biotechnology industry with the goal of enhancing the stress resistance of plants and crop yields.
Prerequisites: None; Students are trained with laboratory techniques and the lab works with students to learn new techniques independent of previous experience. Students who are motivated, interested, honest, inquisitive and careful with respect to adhering to lab safety protocols are preferred.
Website: http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/labs/schroeder

Diana Rennison
Diana Rennison is an Assistant Professor in the Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution section of the Biological Sciences department at UC San Diego. Her group takes an integrative approach to determine the mechanisms central to the origin and maintenance of the spectacular species diversity observed in the world today. The core questions her group seeks to address are: how do sources of selection interact to shape the course of evolution and the generation of biodiversity and why do organisms follow certain evolutionary trajectories when many are possible? To tackle these questions, they integrate population genomics, field collections, and experimental estimates of natural selection. The research project will look at characterizing patterns of morphological and genetic variation in divergent wild threespine stickleback populations. 
Prerequisites: Students must be willing to work on animal specimens.
Website: http://rennisonlab.com

Boris Kramer
Boris Kramer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. His lab has some interesting projects in reduced-order modeling for various applications, for instance space weather, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. Moreover, other projects in risk-based engineering design (design under uncertainty) would require implementing a computational model for a mechanical system and then collaborating with a Postdoc on methods development.
Prerequisites: Students should be comfortable in programming, whether Matlab, python (Jupyterbook) or Julia. Knowledge of ordinary differential equations a must. Knowledge of partial differential equations, numerical linear algebra a plus. Very interested in mechanical systems, particularly Lagrangian and Hamiltonian modeling. Good knowledge of statistics would also be a plus.
Website: 

http://kramer.ucsd.edu/

Tania Morimoto

Tania K. Morimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. She obtained her undergraduate degree at MIT, followed by her masters and PhD degrees at Stanford University, all in Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses on the design and control of flexible continuum robots for increased dexterity and accessibility in uncertain environments, particularly for minimally invasive surgical interventions. She is also working to address the challenges of designing human-in-the-loop interfaces for controlling these flexible and soft robots, including the integration of haptic feedback to improve surgical outcomes.

Website: https://iem.ucsd.edu/researchers/people/profiles/tania-morimoto.html

Jinhye Bae
Jinhye Bae is an Assistant Professor in the NanoEngineering Department at UC San Diego. The Bae lab focuses on understanding and exploiting physics, mechanics, and dynamics of soft matter to develop new pathways of programmable assembly and deformation of soft matter at the nano to macro-scales. The group is interested in Integrating material characteristics into new structural design and fabrication approaches for applications in biomedical devices, soft robotics, actuators, and sensors.
Prerequisites: Students should have taken general physics and chemistry classes.
Website: https://jbae.eng.ucsd.edu/

Shaochen Chen
Dr. Chen is a Professor and Chair in the NanoEngineering Department at UC San Diego. He is also a faculty member of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine and the Clinical Translational Research Institute at UCSD. His research interests include 3D Printing and Bioprinting, Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, Biomaterials and Nanomaterials, Organ/Tissue-on-a-Chip. The development of 3D printing and bioprinting processes is used to create functional tissues for tissue repair and regeneration. 
Prerequisites: None.
Website: http://schen.ucsd.edu/lab/

Thomas Beaumont
The Brain Tumor Epigenomics Laboratory (Beaumont/Kfoury-Beaumont Lab) investigates brain tumor genomics and epigenetics with a specific focus on chromatin remodeling complexes (BAF and PBAF complexes, members of the SWI/SNF family of ATP-dependent chromatin remodelers), sex-specific epigenetics (sex-biased Brd4-bound enhancers and super-enhancers) with a specific focus on identifying tumor dependencies that can be exploited with precision oncology. We use next generation sequencing (NGS), RNA-seq, ChIP-Seq and ATAC-seq to understand the chromatin landscape in parent human tumor tissues and tumor-derived stem cells. Leveraging data from chromatin landscape studies, the lab performs in vitro tumorigenesis and clonogenic studies using human tumor stem cell lines, and directly assess the role of critical candidate regulators by genome editing using CRISPR. We also perform in vivo tumorigenesis and survival analysis using intracerebral microinjection of human-derived tumor stem cells in nude mice to validate potential therapeutic targets. In a related but parallel focus, the laboratory investigates intratumoral heterogeneity, and how this relates to activated enhancers, repressed heterochromatin and specific parafascicular compartments within the brain. These experiments are carried out through collaboration with the Center for Multimodal Imaging Genetics (CMIG) in the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute (ACTRI).

Lab Assistant: Gretchen Zerfas 
Prerequisites:

Microsoft Office and some statistics knowledge
Website:

https://neurosurgery.ucsd.edu/research-innovation/spotlight.html  https://profiles.ucsd.edu/thomas.beaumont  https://providers.ucsd.edu/details/33178/neurosurgery-cancer 

Adam Burgasser
Adam Burgasser is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. In his lab, students will analyze the optical and infrared spectra of the coolest stars and brown dwarfs drawn from online data archives. The analysis will include data reduction, spectral analysis, and source analysis. Students will be trained in python and common spectral analysis techniques, and contribute to the development of a spectral archive for the broader community.
Prerequisites: Students with an interest and/or prior coursework in Astronomy/Astrophysics; some experience in computer programming is required (Python is strongly preferred). Important to note that students may need to install some specialized software as this program will be entirely remote.
Website: http://www.coolstarlab.org

Javier Duarte 
Javier Duarte is an Assitant Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. Dr Duarte's Lab is interested in: 

• LHC data analysis for Higgs boson and exotic new physics
• Hardware-accelerated machine learning for trigger and computing
• Geometric deep learning for particle physics
• Diversity, inclusion, and social justice in physics

Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://jduarte.physics.ucsd.edu/ 

Caren Walker
Dr. Walker's research explores how children learn and reason about the causal structure of the world. In particular, I am interested in how even very young learners are able to acquire abstract representations that extend beyond their observations, simply by thinking. How is "learning by thinking" possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To begin to answer these questions, we must isolate the contributions of our observations from the mechanisms that underlie learning. To this end, my work to date has focused on a suite of activities that impose top-down constraints on human inference, focusing on phenomena that are characteristic of learning in early childhood. My current research includes learning by analogy, by explanation, and by engagement in imaginary worlds. My work is interdisciplinary, combining perspectives in psychology, philosophy, education, and computational theory.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: http://elc-lab-ucsd.com/caren 

Christina Gremel 
Summer projects in the Gremel Lab will focus on how alcohol dependence alters cortical circuits to disrupt goal-directed decision-making and contribute to aberrant alcohol seeking. Students will work in mouse models and use an integrative behavioral and brain circuit approach to examine these questions.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://gremellab.ucsd.edu/ 

Dhananjay Bambah-Mukku
Dr. Bambah-Mukku's lab aims to understand the molecular and neural circuit bases of social behaviors in mice and naked mole rats. The lab employs an interdisciplinary approach combining single-cell and spatial transcriptomics with genetic, behavioral and systems neuroscience tools to explore the function of neural circuits. Summer students may choose from projects spanning behavioral, molecular or computational approaches to understanding social behavior circuits.
Prerequisites: Working on mice is essential. A background in biology or neuroscience is preferred. Some combination of the following: Basic programming in R, general biology/neuroscience classes, previous work with mice
Website: www.bambahmukkulab.com

David Barner 
David Barner is a professor of Psychology and Linguistics at UC San Deigo. Professor Barner's lab investigates how children learn about language, concepts (space, time, number), and other people's minds. This summer he hopes to create a project focused on how children from different cultures learn to count, including virtual testing of children in multiple regions of the US and countries including India, China, and Europe.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: http://ladlab.ucsd.edu/barner.html

Gail Heyman
Gail Heyman is a professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. Her lab focuses on how children reason about the social world, such as addressing questions about school motivation, social learning, and understanding gender and racial biases. An intern working with us would help review prior literature and design studies on one or more of these topics, test child participants, and be involved in coding and analyzing data.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: http://heymanlab.ucsd.edu/ 

Judith Fan 
Judith Fan is an Assistant professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. Doctor Fan's lab works on questions at the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence: Our core goal is to understand what made it possible for humans to develop such a wide array of cognitive technologies — including writing, mathematics, art — and use these tools to continually learn, communicate with others, and solve open-ended problems. Summer interns will be invited to be involved in various aspects of ongoing research, hone their oral and written communication skills, and connect with a broad network of academic mentors.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://cogtoolslab.github.io/

Leslie Carver 
Leslie Carver is a professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. The Developmental and Social Neuroscience Lab (DNLab) investigates early social and cognitive development in typically developing infants and those with a family history of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In our current studies, we are primarily focusing on how infants form expectations in their social interactions, and how they learn from those expectations and from contingent interactions with their caregivers. Our studies use brain activity (EEG), behavior, and eye-tracking to address these questions.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: http://dnlab.ucsd.edu/ 

Lindsey Powell 
Lindsey Powell is an Assistant professor in the Psychology Department at UC San Diego. Her summer projects in the Social Cognition and Learning Lab will investigate how infants and children think about others' minds, social interactions, and relationships. Students will work on the collection, coding, and statistical analysis of behavioral data that test hypotheses regarding the development of social cognition and motivation. Students may also receive basic training in the methods of developmental cognitive neuroscience if desired, though the virtual format will prevent participation in the collection of such data. 
Prerequisites: Preference for those who can work with children (may be involved in online testing w/ infants or children).
Website: http://socallab.ucsd.edu/ 

Stephan Anagnostaras 
Stephan Anagnostaras is a current Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. Doctor Anagostaras's lab conducts research on psychiatric drugs primarily in the area of learning & memory and addiction, using pharmacological approaches in mice. These projects range from understanding the role of memory in relapse, separating the addictive and cognitive enhancing properties of stimulants, and the use of psychedelic drugs to improve therapy for pathological fear and poor social motivation. Summer interns would likely be engaged in research to determine which psychedelics promote social behavior (i.e., empathogen-entactogens) and if this effect can be dissociated from undesirable effects such as amnesia or addiction. Students would gain basic neuroscience and behavioral pharmacology research techniques, writing, and presentation skills.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: http://mocolab.ucsd.edu 

Timothy Brady 
Timothy Brady is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. At the UCSD Vision and Memory lab, directed by Dr. Timothy Brady, we aim to understand how the world is represented by the visual system, and how information is encoded and integrated into memory. The lab is interested in the precision with which people can remember information long-term memory and how much we can actively hold the information in our mind (e.g., you may have heard about a working memory capacity of 7+/- 2).  This project will focus on examining visual memory precision -- how well we can remember what we saw and what we can do to improve our memories. You'll get to learn to do some work in MATLAB; run people in experiments, and learn about the data. The experiments will vary from simple examinations of memory precision to questions about what memory looks like when people have false memories.
Prerequisites: Students with a background in psychology or cognitive science and programming experience preferred.
Website: https://bradylab.ucsd.edu 

Victor Ferreira
Victor Ferreira is a Professor in the Psychology Department at UC San Diego. Dr. Ferreira's research focuses on language production and communication. Specific research questions center on how speakers form sentences, how speakers retrieve and produce individual words, and how the knowledge that speakers and listeners have of one another affects language production behavior.
Prerequisites: Students are required to have a general knowledge of psychology experimental design and statistics (e.g., have taken undergraduate methods and statistics class). Spanish-speakers are specially considered but not required.
Website: https://lpl.ucsd.edu

Graham McVicker
The McVicker laboratory studies how human genetic variation affects gene regulation by combining experimental approaches with computational analyses. We are especially interested in identifying pathogenic regulatory variants that act in immune cells and cancer cells. Currently, we are developing new tools to discover somatic regulatory mutations in cancer genomes, and manipulating cell lines with high-throughput CRISPR technologies to discover new regulatory sequences. In much of our research, we develop sophisticated computational and statistical methods so that we can extract subtle signals from noisy experimental data.
Prerequisites: Students should either have some computational experience (e.g. programming in Python, R, etc.) or molecular biology experience (e.g. PCR, cloning, etc.).
Website: http://mcvicker.salk.edu/ 

Chitra Mandyam 
Chitra Mandyam is an Associate Adjunct Professor of Anesthesiology in the Health Sciences department at UC San Diego. Research Project title: Blood-brain-barrier dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex in alcoholic rats. The blood-brain-barrier (BBB) plays an integral role in protecting the brain from various peripheral insults, including emigration of cytokines and other immune responses. Our lab has preliminary findings to show that the BBB is disrupted in alcoholic rats, and this may lead to increases in neuroimmune responses in the brain. We also believe that this increase in neuroimmune response and BBB dysfunction assists with dysfunctional plasticity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. The student intern will assist the research fellows in the lab to determine the types of cytokines and extent of BBB damage in the prefrontal cortex of rats experiencing chronic alcohol exposure. We will use techniques such as Western blotting, ELISAs, fluorescent microscopy to determine these issues. Preclinical rodent models of alcohol dependence will be used.
Prerequisites: Students majoring in Biochemistry or Neuroscience are preferred. Students should have an interest in performing animal behavior such as animal handling and operant self-administration, biochemical experiments including Western blotting, immunohistochemistry and should be interested in performing extensive microscopic analysis. Students with experience in animal handling, pipetting, tissue handling are desired.  
Website: https://profiles.ucsd.edu/chitra.mandyam

Hemal Patel
Hemal Patel is a Professor and Vice-Chair for Research at UC San Diego. His laboratory aims to utilize molecular, cellular, and whole animal approaches to understand physiology/pathophysiology in different organ systems. They utilize cellular models such as isolated adult rat and mouse cardiac myocytes and neurons to understand the cellular and subcellular consequences of various pathophysiologies. Also, they study the protein caveolin and its role in biology. Their method uses a variety of molecular, biophysical, cellular, and animal physiology to study these proteins. The particular interest is how caveolins interface with cellular metabolism to regulate cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, cancer, and neurodegeneration. Students will work with a number of scientists in the laboratory to learn various techniques and then apply these to a small project under the direction of a senior fellow.
Prerequisites: Students should have a solid background in general biology and chemistry. Students should also be okay with animal work. 
Website: https://cardiacneuroprotection.com/

The Department of Biomedical Informatics designs, implements, and evaluates informatics algorithms and systems that serve biomedical researchers, other healthcare providers, and public health professionals. Students who are interested in being mentored by DBMI Mentors will participate in both STARS and DBMI activities. DBMI Activities have previously included workshops on topics such as Data Science and Informatics, Computational Environments (R/RStudio), R Basics, Informatics Research Ethics, The Electronic Health Record, Data in Databases and SQL, Using the MIMIC Dataset, Hackers and Healthcare, Visualizing Data and Analysis, and Basic Biostatistics.

Applicants requesting to be matched to DBMI Mentors should pay close attention to project prerequisites and special considerations listed after each project description. DBMI Website: https://dbmi.ucsd.edu.

Faculty Mentors: 

• Lucila Ohno-Machado
• Rodney Gabriel
• Shamim Nemati
• Kathleen (Kit) Curtius
• Tsung-Ting Kuo

Kathleen (Kit) Curtius
Dr. Kathleen (Kit) Curtius is an Assistant Professor in the Division for Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine at UC San Diego. Her research in the Quantitative Cancer Control laboratory focuses on understanding the evolutionary process of carcinogenesis. Our translational goal is to find and identify dangerous precancerous lesions (or diverse hotbeds of clones) in patients early enough to intervene and prevent invasive cancer. This project will characterize genomic features of data from early stages of pre-cancer formation (such as diversity of copy number alterations) and build computational models for the prediction of future cancer.
Prerequisites: Student must have experience using R programming language and must have completed courses in bioinformatics, mathematics, and statistics. A specific interest in the research of our lab is desired.
Website: https://qcclab.com/ 

Lucila Ohno-Machado
Lucila Ohno-Machado is the Professor of Medicine Chair in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego Health as well as an Associate Dean for Informatics and Technology. The STARS student will help on a project that provides answers to COVID-19 questions from clinicians: https://covid19questions.org along with helping to produce high-end graphics for the results.
Prerequisites: Students are required to have knowledge of computer programming and basic statistics (R language preferred).
Website: https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/dbmi/people/faculty/Pages/lucila-ohno-machado.aspx 

Rodney Gabriel
Dr. Rodney A. Gabriel holds position as Chief of the Division of Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Medicine and is the Medical Director at the Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion surgery center. He is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Associate Adjunct Professor in Biomedical Informatics. His research interests include the development of predictive models for perioperative outcomes using machine learning and in novel regional anesthesia techniques for pain management. Dr. Gabriel is actively involved in the acute pain management of surgical patients, especially focused on the reduction of opioid use.
Prerequisites: Willing to learn (if not already known) statistics and programming in R and/or python.
Website: https://profiles.ucsd.edu/rodney.gabriel 

Shamim Nemati
Shamim Nemati is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego. The NematiLab focuses on the application of machine learning and deep learning techniques to early prediction of life-threatening conditions in hospitalized patients. This project will be focused on the early prediction of sepsis, acute kidney injury, and/or respiratory arrest.
Prerequisites: Student must have experience using Python, Matlab, Introductory Machine Learning.
Website: http://nematilab.info/ 

Tsung-Ting Kuo
Tsung-Ting Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in UC San Diego Health Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). The Kuo Lab is focused on predictive modeling that can advance research and facilitate quality improvement initiatives and substantiate research results, especially when data from multiple healthcare systems can be included. However, current, state-of-the-art privacy-preserving predictive modeling frameworks are still centralized, in other words, the models from distributed sites are integrated in a central server to build a global model. This centralization carries several risks, e.g., single-point-of-failure at the central server. To improve the security and robustness of predictive modeling frameworks, they want to develop and implement novel and advanced algorithms on decentralized blockchain networks (a distributed ledger/database technology adopted by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency) to build better models. The outcome will be algorithms that improve the predictive power of data from multiple healthcare systems through a distributed system.
Prerequisites: Computer programming such as Java or Python.
Website: https://profiles.ucsd.edu/tsung-ting.kuo

Alon Goren
The Goren Lab studies the characterization of the roles of mitotic associated histone deacetylation patterns. Mitosis, a tightly regulated cell cycle phase, is critical for ensuring that the cellular identity is correctly relayed to daughter cells. Mitosis includes key changes including a decrease in transcription. Little is known about the roles that mitotic-specific patterns of histone marks play in regulating the transcriptional changes during and following mitosis. Initial studies, by us and others, showed that mitosis includes global deacetylation of histones, and that there is a mitosis-specific deacetylation of the nucleosome entering the NDR (nucleosome depleted region) of most genes. This project focuses on the involvement of mitotic histone deacetylations in the transcriptional changes. In particular, the role of histone deacetylases involved in mitosis will be studied by focusing on three candidate HDACs (HDAC3, SIRT1 and SIRT6) via targeted inhibition and measurement of changes in localization and levels of H3K9ac, the substrate of all three HDACs, by ChIP-seq. The involvement of deacetylation in regulating mitotic transcription and G1 reactivation will be studied by using pulse labeling of nascent transcripts to identify changes in mitotic transcription and after mitotic release following inhibition of specific HDACs. Lastly, using inducible dCas9 tethered to a HAT or HDAC, we will establish a system to locally modify the acetylation of target loci at a specific time during the cell cycle, to allow studying of the roles local histone acetylation plays in regulating the mitotic gene expression and reactivation kinetics. Together, the integrative approach will enable us to address key questions regarding the cellular means required for the proper execution of mitosis and the recovery from this phase.
Prerequisites: Experience in molecular biology and epigenomic techniques such as ChIP-seq would be advantageous.
Website: goren-lab.github.io

Melissa Gymrek 
Dr. Melissa Gymrek is an Assistant Professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Dr. Gymrek's lab strives to understand complex genetic variants that underlie human disease. In particular, her lab focuses on repetitive DNA variants known as short tandem repeats (STRs) as a model for complex variation. The lab's work also focuses on developing computational tools for analyzing complex variation from large-scale sequencing data and applying these tools to learn about the contribution of repetitive variation to human disease. Another major interest of the Gymrek group is understanding how repeats and other types of genetic variation impact gene regulation and other complex traits.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://gymreklab.com/ 

Chengbiao Wu
Chengbiao Wu is an Associate Professor in the School of Medicine under the Neurosciences Department. His lab is actively developing cutting-edge technologies to pursue novel hypotheses regarding axonopathy. For this project, the focus is using cell models and animal models as they are interested in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease. Research students also study peripheral sensory neuropathy such as Charcot Marie Tooth disease.
Prerequisites: Students are required to have taken general biology courses.
Website: https://wulaboratory.weebly.com/

Asa Gustafsson
The Gustafsson lab studies cellular quality control pathways in the heart. Cardiac myocytes are terminally differentiated and have limited ability to regenerate. Therefore, keeping these cells healthy is critical for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and heart failure. In particular, maintaining a healthy mitochondrial network is extremely important in cardiac myocytes because of the high energy demand of contractile activity. One of the main pathways regulating mitochondrial quality control is selective autophagy of the mitochondria, known as mitophagy. In this process, mitochondria are targeted to vesicles called autophagosomes then are degraded upon fusion of the autophagosome with the lysosome. Our lab uses genetics, cellular and molecular biology techniques, microscopy, and mouse models to investigate the machinery regulating mitophagy as well as alternative mitochondrial quality control pathways.

Lab Graduate Student Researcher: Rachel Diao 
Prerequisites: Students must be okay with working in a lab that does experiments on animals (mice). Students who have taken general biology courses are preferred. Experience in pipetting and basic molecular biology techniques would help but is not required.
Website: https://gustafssonlabucsd.org/

David Gonzalez 
David Gonzalez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy. The last 100 years of microbiology research have clearly established that symbiotic and pathogenic microbes colonizing humans have the ability to impact health, disease, and drug action. A next step in studying the complex interaction between host and microbe is to "directly" define the molecular factors that govern biological function (i.e. proteins, metabolites, post-translational modifications) and delineate their associated mechanisms of action. Towards this goal, the Gonzalez laboratory utilizes a systems scale to single target approach to study bacterial pathogenesis, host responses to infection, and the human microbiome. At its core, the laboratory develops and applies multiplexing quantitative proteomics tools to simultaneously track thousands of protein dynamics and associated post-translational modifications in an accurate and high throughput fashion. We then interface microbiology techniques to characterize important factors identified during these interactions. When appropriate, translational studies of therapeutic value are undertaken in tissue culture, murine models, and by the analysis of human biospecimens. This information is then used to design novel strategies for the detection or treatment of microbial-driven infectious diseases in humans. We have four active projects recruiting undergraduates: 1. microbial protein effectors in the gut-brain axis, 2. novel virulence factors in Groups A and B strep, 3. microproteins in staph infections, and 4. gut microbial proteases in inflammatory bowel disease.
Prerequisites: Students should feel comfortable with mouse work happening in the lab and working with human biospecimen including stool and blood. 

Background in biology required. Chemistry, physics, microbiology a plus.
Website: www.gonzalezlab.org

Geoffrey Chang
Dr. Geoffrey Chang is a Professor at the UC San Diego Skagg's School of Pharamacy. Dr. Chang's laboratory has a very high commitment to develop innovative techniques for overcoming the challenges of producing and crystallizing integral membrane proteins suitable for biophysical analysis. They also have structure-function projects focused on drug transporters important for multidrug resistance and drug efficacy as well as transporters for parasites causing malaria. Dr. Chang's lab is pioneering a new method for evolving molecular scaffolds (synthetic affinity maturation), which include antibodies funded by the NIH Eureka mechanism. They are also introducing and re-engineering oil transporters to secrete alkanes and other biofuel substrates partnership with the US Air Force Research Laboratory.
Prerequisites: N/A
Website: https://pharmacy.ucsd.edu/faculty/chang