Dan Dickinson

Associate Professor

Dan has been obsessed with cell polarity ever since graduate school, when he discovered polarized epithelial tissues in Dictyostelium with Bill Weis and James Nelson at Stanford. After finishing his Ph.D. at Stanford, he was a postdoc in Bob Goldstein’s lab at UNC Chapel Hill where he developed genome editing and single-cell biochemistry tools to study polarity in the C. elegans zygote. He joined the faculty at UT Austin in 2017.

Naomi Stolpner

Staff Scientist / Assistant Professor of Practice

Naomi earned her Ph.D. in the Dickinson lab, where she did beautiful work on inside-outside polarity in C. elegans. She is now a senior scientist in the lab and is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of our Glow Worms Freshman Research stream.

Nadia Manzi

Postdoctoral Researcher

Nadia was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona where she worked on cancer cell invasion; she received a prestigious AMGEN scholarship while an undergrad. She earned her Ph.D. in our lab, where she studied the role of Aurora A kinase in zygote polarity. She also made key contributions to Naomi’s paper on inside-outside polarity and to a collaborative project on microtubule motors with Stefanie Redemann’s lab. Now, as a postdoc, she’s shifted to the embryonic stem cell world, where she’s building tools for live imaging and sc-SiMPull from 3D spheroid cultures.

Sheng-Ping Hsu

Ph.D. Student

Sheng-Ping comes from a neuroscience background but has become an sc-SiMPull expert since joining the lab. Right now he’s working on studying PAR complex assembly in the C. elegans zygote, but eventually hopes to extend his work to C. elegans and mammalian neurons.

Clayton Pavlich

Ph.D. Student

Clayton was an undergraduate at Texas A&M and then worked with Lauren Ehrlich as a post-bac before joining our group. He’s interested in the regulation of Cdc42 during zygote polarity establishment and maintenance.

Yash Shukla

Ph.D. Student

Yash was an undergraduate in Hong Kong, where he worked with DNA Origami and aptamers.  He’s leading a collaboration with the Cenik lab to study how newly-translated proteins remodel polarity in post-zygotic C. elegans embryos.

Jacquelyn Wright

Ph.D. Student (co-advised by David Taylor)

Jacquelyn completed her undergraduate studies at Creighton University where she implemented TIRF microscopy and studied an interaction between two proteins that functions in gene silencing. She is working on a joint project between our lab and Dr. David Taylor’s lab, utilizing single-molecule microscopy techniques to characterize CRISPR enzymes both in vitro and in vivo.

Lea Jinks

Lab Manager

Lea has an undergraduate degree in biology and worked in a lab studying corals before joining us at UT.  They help keep the lab organized and running smoothly. 

Abeer Almohammed

Undergraduate Researcher

Abeer is interested in inside-outside polarity in 8-cell embryos and has been looking at whether phospholipid asymmetry might play a role in symmetry breaking in these cells.

Ajay Avala

Undergraduate Researcher

Ajay is interested in microscopy and technology development. Right now he’s learning sc-SiMPull, with an eye towards microscope building and other methods development work in the future.

Lars Deutz

Undergraduate Researcher

Lars is a neuroscience major and a member of the prestigious Dean’s Scholars program who is using single-cell in vivo biochemistry to study the CDC-42 small GTPase.  

Nicole Grater

Post-Bac Researcher

Nicole worked in Blerta Xhemalce’s lab before moving to our lab for her senior year. She’s studying mechanisms of junctional remodeling in mouse ES cell spheroids.

Cindy Hu

Undergraduate Researcher

Cindy is working with Yash on the regulation of inside-outside polarity in C. elegans early embryos.