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.

Tahmina Akter

Ph.D. Student

Bio coming soon!

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.

Darshini Poola

Ph.D. Student

Bio coming soon!

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Ashley Ferry

Undergraduate Researcher

Bio coming soon!

Victor A Corona Vargas

Undergraduate Researcher

Bio coming soon!

Parinita Varshney

Undergraduate Researcher

Bio coming soon!