Illustrations by Lindsey Leigh lindseyleighart.com
Sabrina Hernández
Sabrina is a Biology PhD student studying neural development in Ciona. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology at the University of Massachusetts – Boston in 2023. During her undergrad, she studied the development of germ line stem cells in zebrafish and their role in fertility and reproduction. She was also a member of the UMass Boston SACNAS student chapter which strives to promote diversity and inclusion in science. Her hobbies include exercising, cooking, and spending time with her cats.
Bita Jadali
Bita is a Biology PhD student and a graduate from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, concentration in neuroscience. She is interested in studying the programmed neurodegeneration of the tunicate larval CNS and its replacement by the adult CNS. In her free time, she enjoys reading, listening to music, and spending time outside.
Lindsey Cohen
Lindsey earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with a minor in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Georgia in the Spring of 2021. During her time as an undergraduate, she was able to gain a wealth of scientific knowledge from the smallest units of life to the largest. She also participated in various organizations such as the Minority Student Science Association and Doctors Without Borders which grew her interest in diversity in the realm of science and the discovery of avenues to aid people around the world through local volunteering opportunities. Post-graduation, she worked with a vision clinic to provide students with access to eye care, as well as worked with the Marietta City Schools charter system to contact trace and spearhead COVID-19 testing initiatives for optimal safety on school campuses. She currently works in the lab as a technician and is striving every day to expand her scope of biological sciences and immerse deeper into research. Her hobbies include photography and videography, singing, and traveling.
Sydney Popsuj
Sydney is a Biology PhD student interested in evolutionary-developmental biology (Evo-Devo). She is looking forward to studying the nuances and impacts of evolutionary loss on development in tailed and tailless tunicates. She received her Bachelor's of Science in Biology at Agnes Scott College. During her time as an undergraduate, she focused on the development of marine invertebrates and specifically looked into regeneration ability in annelids. In her spare time Sydney enjoys playing cello, thrifting, and cooking.
C.J. Johnson
Dr. Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow currently following up on his PhD thesis work on cell type identity and function in the sensory/adhesive papillae and combinatorial regulation of muscle subtype-specific gene expression in Ciona. He recently graduated from the Georgia Tech Biology PhD program.
Eduardo Gigante
Eduardo earned a BS and MS from Binghamton University in New York. He then spent 3 years at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Maryland studying neural pathways of food and drug addiction. He did his PhD work at Emory University, using a mouse model of embryonic development to study the intersection of primary cilia and neural tube patterning. His love of all things Evo-Devo compelled him to join the lab in June 2021. Eduardo’s hobbies include running, cooking, woodworking, home brewing, and sharing those hobbies with his family and friends.
Undergraduates
Wesley Bartlett
Reagan Hicks
Preet Kalsi
Faustina Merveille (Georgia State)
Caroline Nawrocki
Former lab members
Katarzyna Piekarz
Katarzyna was a postdoc in the lab from 2021 to 2024, working on bioinformatic analysis of gene expression and neurodevelopment in Ciona. She made crucial contributions to several papers touching on several components of the Ciona nervous system including the sensory papillae, motor ganglion, bipolar tail neurons, and the progenitors of the adult nervous system. She also produced the first computational model of ddN function in the motor ganglion, which can be found here. She is currently pursuing her interest in neural circuit modelling as a postdoc in the Bagnall lab at Washington University in St. Louis.
Kwantae Kim
Kwantae was the first Ph.D. student to graduate from the lab. He joined in 2019 and graduated in 2023, successfully defending his thesis research on gene regulatory networks underlying the development of two distinct neuron types in the Ciona larva: the BTNs and the ddNs. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Morphogenesis and Developmental Biomechanics Lab at Columbia University, under the mentorship of Prof. Nandan Nerurkar.
Akhil Kulkarni
Akhil worked in the lab as a technician in Spring 2023, validating CRISPR/Cas9 guide RNAs to knock out Rab proteins in tunicate neurons. He also helped follow up on data that his group obtained in a Ciona-specific CRISPR lab course he took in his senior year, in which a metamorphosis defect was observed upon knocking out the gene Vamp1/2/3 in the papillae. This work resulted in a recent paper published in Biology Open (see papers). He is currently doing a postbac at the NIH.
Susanne Gibboney
Susanne was a technician in the lab from 2018-2021. In addition to making invaluable contributions towards establishing the lab and research projects, she was co-author on some of the lab’s first papers, thanks to her mastery of CRISPR/Cas9, in situ hybridization, and molecular cloning.
Florian Razy-Krajka
Florian was a senior scientist in the lab from 2018-2021, working on the evolution and post-metamorphic development of ectoderm derivatives in Ciona. He has made many key contributions to the study of nervous system and muscle development in tunicates, and is one of the foremost experts in the world on CRISPR/Cas9 and transcriptome profiling in Ciona.
Elijah Lowe
Elijah was a postdoc in the lab from 2018-2020, working on evo-devo and computational biology projects in Ciona and Molgula. He is now Senior Bioinformatics Systems Software Engineer at Guardant Health. Originally from Atlanta, he received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Morehouse College and his PhD from Michigan State University in Computer Science focusing on computational biology and evolution and development. Following the PhD, Elijah worked for 3 years in Naples, Italy as postdoctoral researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn before coming to our lab.
Jiachen “Nicole” Duan
Nicole performed research with us from 2018-2019 as a Masters student in the Bioinformatics program. Her project, supported by an MS Bioinformatics Graduate Research Assistantship, was to look for transcriptome changes in the tunicate nervous system looking at single-cell RNAseq data. Originally from Dalian, China, she received her Bachelor of Science in Biology from Trinity College, doing her undergraduate research on arthropod segmentation (see paper here and thesis here). She currently holds the position of Senior Bioinformatics Product Manager at Singelron Biotechnologies.
Sarthak Sharma
Sarthak did research in the lab from 2017-2018 while pursuing the MS in Bioinformatics, using Machine Learning applications to analyze large datasets of gene expression in single cells from the Tunicate nervous system (see papers). During this time, he earned various honors including the MS Bioinformatics Graduate Research Assistantship (twice) and the J. Leland Jackson Outstanding Bioinformatic Master’s Student Fellowship. Upon graduating, he accepted a software engineer position in the biotech industry and is now a Bioinformatics Engineer at Twist Bioscience.
Former Undergraduates:
Shohon Rafique
Sriikhar Vedurupaka (PURA awardee)
Shruthi Mohana Sundaram
Hussan Ali
Arabella Lewis (Agnes Scott College)
Sydney Ward (Agnes Scott College)
Cornelia Barrett
Leslie Cohen (ECSEL student)
Tanner Shearer
Alex Gurgis (PURA awardee)
Jameson Orvis (3X PURA awardee)
Evani Patel (Fast Track student)
Celine Jarvis (CoS Dean’s Intern)
Nefatiti Anderson (REU student - Spelman College)
Paula Martinez-Feduchi
Mikaela Thurman
Sara Shoushtarian
Meira Zibitt
Former visiting scholars:
Paola Olivo (SZN Napoli)
Ugo Coppola (SZN Napoli)
How to join
We are not recruiting postdocs or students at the moment, sorry! Check back again later.
If you are a prospective PhD student open to joining another lab at Georgia Tech, check out these grad programs:
Ph.D in Quantitative Biosciences