People

Carlos A. Castañeda

Started at SU in late 2014; jointly appointed in both the Department of Biology and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program and the Bioinspired Institute

PhD, Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)

BA, Chemistry, Mathematics, La Salle University (Philadelphia, PA)

Lab Manager / Research Scientist

Thuy Dao
PhD, Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)

A graduate of the Doug Barrick lab

Nirbhik Acharya
PhD Biological Sciences, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India

Nirbhik started here as a postdoc in July 2023. He’s diving head on into investigating the driving forces for DSK2 phase transition and quickly mastering NMR spectroscopy!

Billy Haws
PhD Biology, Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY)

Billy started in 2022, after graduating from Kate Lewis’ lab at SU. His prior expertise is in zebrafish and deciphering functions of DNA-binding proteins important for nervous system development. He now develops live-imaging modalities to understand UBQLN function in cells.

Anitha Rajendran
PhD University of Udine (Udine UD, Italy)

Anitha started in 2022, after finishing her PhD examining condensate formation in cells. Anitha is our expert cell biologist and is currently examining the function of ubiquilins in cells.

Sydney French (Rotation student, Biology)

Sydney is investigating how binding partners affect the phase transition of UBQLN2!

Grace Engel ’25 (Biochemistry)

Grace is working with Anitha to investigate the localization of UBQLN2 under different stress conditions.

Alana Ramirez ’27

Alana is learning how to analyze formation of UBQLN2 condensates under stress in cells.

Gianna Frank ’26 (Biochemistry/Neuroscience)

Gianna is working with Billy on live cell imaging and data analysis.

Sini Shqair ’26 (Biochemistry)

Sini is working with Thuy on building phase diagrams of PQC proteins.

We hosted a few amazing high school students! Here are Omar Bou Aram and Sarah Rinzan, who both were here over summer 2022. They learned a lot about protein purification, phase separation, and dry ice fun!

During the summer of 2022, we also hosted Roberto Tira, a visiting PhD graduate student from the University of Verona in Italy! We’re excited to continue this collaboration.

Amber Rusnock joined our lab as a lab technician for 1 year (2021-2022). Despite her short time in the lab, she led efforts to get our cell bio infrastructure up and running when we moved to LSC, while also contributing to cell bio experiments recently published here.

Christine Habjan ’19 started in our lab in 2017, and stayed to do summer research in 2018. She presented her work at the 2018 Summer Research Symposium @ SUNY-ESF!

Jules Riley ’20 joined the lab as a first year student, worked across three different labs to get cell stress experiments going in our lab for the first time. As an undergraduate, she published a first author research paper – you can read it here! Here she is presenting her research at the 2018 summer undergraduate research symposium.

Emily Morton was our first Chemistry REU student in summer 2015!