People
David F. Savage
Dave is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dave was born and raised in rural Iowa. He continues to help manage his family’s farm, which was recognized in 2010 as an Iowa Heritage Farm. Dave attended Gustavus Adolphus College, where he earned a B.A. in Chemistry and minored in Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from UCSF for his work on membrane protein structure determination with Robert Stroud. From 2007 to 2011, Dave was a Life Sciences Research Foundation fellow with Pamela Silver in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
Research in the Savage Lab focuses on understanding and engineering two of the most compelling biochemical systems found in nature: CO2 fixation and genome editing enzyme machineries. Ultimately, this works seeks to develop enabling genome editing technology and apply it for improving photosynthetic CO2 assimilation in plants. For this work, Dave’s research has been recognized with the DOE Early Career Program Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and he was selected for the 2018 “Future of Biochemistry” issue by ACS-Biochemistry. Dave is committed to extending the impact of scientific discovery beyond the laboratory. He is a co-creator of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course on synthetic biology, a founding member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, co-creator of the African Plant Breeding Academy CRISPR Course and a co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics.
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Muntathar Al-Shimary
Muntathar is a graduate student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program and jointly advised by Jennifer Doudna. He is interested in the discovery and characterization of new CRISPR-Cas effectors.
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Julia Borden
Julia is a graduate student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program. She is interested in the principles protein compartments use to create unique chemical environments in the cell.
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Jack Desmarais
Jack is a graduate student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program. He is interested in both high-throughput strategies and mechanistic biochemical approaches for investigating bacterial carbon dioxide fixation.
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David Ding
David is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab who obtained his PhD in protein evolution at Harvard/MIT. He is interested in developing high-throughput and computational methods to engineer biological systems to address sustainability goals.
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Evan Groover
Evan is a graduate student in Plant and Microbial Biology. He is and is developing gene editing tools to study and improve plant photosynthesis.
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Maria Lukarska
Maria is a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellow in the lab who obtained her PhD in structural biology at EMBL. She is interested in using protein engineering to create more efficient and specific genetic engineering tools.
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Christian Nixon
Christian is a staff research associate in the laboratory.
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Luke Oltrogge
Luke is a project scientist in the lab who obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Stanford. He is interested in the biophysical mechanisms driving the self-assembly of bacterial microcompartments, in particular the α-carboxysome.
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Naiya Phillips
Naiya is a graduate student in the Molecular and Cell Biology program. She is interested in characterizing the sequenc-function landscape of enzymes which use CO2.
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Andrew Plebanek
Andrew is interested in the evolution of proteins and functional RNAs as well as applying and developing novel protein engineering techniques.
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Noam Prywes
Noam is a postdoctoral fellow and who works jointly with the lab of Brian Staskwicz. He is studying rubisco biochemistry and chloroplast transformation technology.
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Joseph Rivera
Joe is a staff research associate in the laboratory.
E: josephr5462@berkeley.edu
Jorge Rodriguez
Jorge is a graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology.
E: rodriguez_jorge@berkeley.edu
Arik Shams
Arik is an NSF fellow and graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology. He is interested in the engineering of CRISPR proteins with new functions.
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Julia Tartaglia
Julia is a graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology and jointly advised by Jennifer Doudna. She is interested in high throughput strategies to engineer and advance the delivery of CRISPR proteins.
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Brittney Thornton
Brittney is an NSF fellow and graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology. Brittney is researching how CRISPR systems acquire new spacers to recognize foreign genetic invaders, and is interested in approaching this question using high throughput screening. Brittney is a joint student with the Doudna Lab.
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Luis Valentin-Alvarado
Luis is a graduate student in the Graduate Group in Microbiology and is jointly advised by Jill Banfield.
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Flora Wang
Flora is a graduate student in Plant and Microbial Biology and is jointly advised by Krishna Niyogi.
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Rachel Weissman
Rachel is a graduate student in Molecular and Cell Biology.
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