Minor Tweak, Major Impact

Dr. Ryoji Amamoto is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Dr. Connie Cepko. He did his undergrad at the University of Illinois and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2017. As a postdoc, he has two main projects: one is to understand how the retina degenerates in a blindness disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa, and another is to develop molecular tools to facilitate answering complicated questions in vivo.

Dr. Mun Ching Lee is a biologist and has founded a company to automate biological experiments during her PhD research. She was part of a multi-award winning iGEM team during her undergrads, which competed at MIT. She is now running an early cancer detection company called Ameryz Bio.

Dr. Stephen Floor is an assistant professor at the University of California in San Francisco. He did his college education in Kansas where he majored in physics and computer science and then got a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UCSF. He did my postdoc with Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley and came back just two years ago to start his own group at UCSF. Dr. Stephen Floor's lab studies how genes are expressed and decisions are made to turn on or turn off a gene, mostly in mammalian cells. There is a lot of work that is focused on control of the transcriptional step, his group is really the most interested in how genes are regulated after RNAs are produced from a gene and how different are the molecules from the same gene might have different functions. His group studies this both in normal cells and in cells that have genetic mutations, they could rise to diseases like cancer.

Anna Behle studied Biology at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. There she completed her Masters thesis at the Institute for Synthetic Microbiology led by Ilka Axmann which she also joined for her PhD two years ago. Annas work focuses on gene regulation in cyanobacteria, with a special focus on the regulation of DNA topology, which is known to be a global regulatory mechanism in the cell to sense environmental conditions such as nutrient availability and respond by adjusting gene expression of genes in different ways. Her group is working to gain an understanding in order to precisely manipulate the metabolic state of the cells.

Phillip Cleves is a geneticist applying modern molecular techniques to study coral biology and their response to climate change. Phillip got his PhD at the University of California - Berkeley in 2015 and now is studying symbiotic anemones and corals at Stanford University in Dr. John Pringles’ lab as a post-doctoral scholar.

Mansi received her A.B. in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College. During her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, she studied comparative genomics of early-diverging animal lineages including cnidarians, placozoans, and sponges. During her postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, she collected three banded panther worms from a marine pond in Bermuda and developed them as a new model system for studying regeneration. In 2015, She started her faculty position at Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where her research group studies many facets of the biology of panther worms.

Philip B. Stark is Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies topics ranging from astrophysics to earthquake prediction to gender bias to election integrity to wild food in urban ecosystems. He has published more than 190 articles and books and has lectured in thirty countries. Stark received the Presidential Young Investigator Award, the John Gideon Award for Election Integrity, the Chancellor's Award for Research in the Public Interest, the Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Transparency in Social Science, a Velux/Villum Foundation Professorship, and a Miller Professorship.

Samantha Morris, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Developmental Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. She established her research group in 2015, focusing on developing new single-cell experimental and computational approaches to dissect mechanisms of cell fate reprogramming. Sam trained at the University of Cambridge with Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, investigating early mammalian fate specification. She then joined the laboratory of George Daley at Harvard Medical School, where she focused on the analysis of gene regulatory networks to dissect and engineer cell identity. Together with her group, she continues in pursuit of her goal to engineer clinically relevant cell populations, translating new insights in cell fate specification into better models of disease and development.

Dr. Begley is the inaugural CEO of BioCurate, a joint initiative of Monash and Melbourne Universities and created to provide commercial focus in the early phases of drug development. He served as Chief Scientific Officer at Akriveia Therapeutics, California (2016-2017) and TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, Pennsylvania (2012-2016). From 2002-2012, he was Vice-President and Global Head of Hematology/Oncology Research at Amgen, responsible for building, directing and integrating Amgen’s 5 research sites. There he highlighted the issue of research integrity and scientific reproducibility. Since then he has made multiple presentations on the subject of scientific integrity including to President Obama's Science Council, the White House, US National Institutes of Health, US Academies of Science, US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the British Broadcasting Company, Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, and numerous Universities, Research Institutes and companies. Before Amgen he had

Luke Schwerdtfeger graduated from Colorado State University with a Bachelor's Degree in Biological Sciences, prior to joining the same universities PhD program in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. Luke’s doctoral work, for which he is advised by Dr. Stuart Tobet, focuses on understanding the nervous system of the mammalian intestine and how it functions in response to pathogen invasion.

Minor Tweak, Major Impact is a short form podcast about scientific research methods. The show looks into a series of stories related to following protocols and how a minor tweak can produce major results, major impact.