Dickinson Lab
People

Dan Dickinson
Assistant 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.

Ivy Chang
Ph.D. Student
Ivy was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. She’s used high-resolution imaging and manipulation of PAR-3 oligomers to understand how cortical flow can transport proteins to polarize cells, and is now working on understanding how PAR complex assembly is regulated.

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.

Nadia Manzi
Ph.D. Student
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’s launching a new project exploring how cell cycle machinery influences the molecular organization of the PAR system in both C. elegans and mammalian stem cells.

Nicole Shi
Ph.D. Student
Nicole studied medicine in China before shifting her focus to basic research. She’s working on dissecting mechanisms of polarity in mammalian cells, using stem cell derived organoid cultures.

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.

Naomi Stolpner
Ph.D. Student
Naomi was an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, where she worked on Drosophila border cell migration in Denise Montell’s lab. She’s studying how PAR polarity is reprogrammed in post-zygotic stages of C. elegans development.

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.

Nitya Kopparapu
Post-Bac Researcher
Nitya graduated from UT in 2021 with a biochemistry major and computer science minor. She’s working with Nicole to characterize polarity protein localization in mouse ES cells.

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.

Lauren Ohler
Undergraduate Researcher
Lauren has a strong interest in mammalian developmental biology and has previously done research at MD Anderson cancer center. She’s working with Nicole on 3D organoid models of polarity.

Bailey de Jesus
Undergraduate Researcher
Bailey is an alum of our Glow Worms Freshman Research Initiative stream who is working with Nadia to study the role of the Aurora A cell cycle kinase in early zygote polarity.

All are welcome!
We’re proud to be a team that includes people of diverse backgrounds. If you love worms, cells, molecules, microscopes or all of the above, You Belong Here.