People — tune in to tunicates

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

C.J. is a Biology PhD student studying cell type identity and function in the papillae that are required for settlement and metamorphosis of Ciona larvae, and combinatorial regulation of muscle subtype-specific gene expression.

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.

Katarzyna Piekarz

Katarzyna earned her MS in Biotechnology from Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland. She spent a year at Oklahoma Research Foundation as a Research Trainee and then stayed in the US to pursue PhD in Neuroscience at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. During her PhD studies, she worked on how to prevent the loss of alpha motor neurons in mammalian aging and neurodegeneration, specifically in ALS. During that time, she also developed an interest in development and regeneration. She also has two other MS degrees: in Italian Language and Culture, and in Latin American Studies. In her free time, she enjoys practicing yoga, reading, and sewing, and she tries to learn to play shamisen (but she realizes it will take a while...).

Undergraduate researchers:

Shruthi Mohana Sundaram

Sriikhar Vedurupaka

Hussan Ali

Former members:

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:

Arabella Lewis (Agnes Scott College)

Sydney Ward (Agnes Scott College)

Cornelia Barrett

Shohon Rafique

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

How to join

We are open to accepting new PhD students in the medium-term future, especially for first-year rotations. If you are interested in Georgia Tech graduate programs, check out:

Ph.D in Biology

Ph.D in Quantitative Biosciences

Ph.D in Bioinformatics

We are not recruiting any postdocs, technicians, or undergraduates at the moment, sorry! Check back again later.