Team
Alan did his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge with Tom Blundell and was a postdoc with Matt Higgins and Venki Ramakrishnan. He started at HMS in September 2017 and was named a Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2019. He was promoted to Associate Professor in January 2023.
Jin obtained his B.Sc. from Peking University and joined the lab in August 2021 after completing a Ph.D. with Karl Lechtreck at UGA. Jin studies the mastigoneme, and how axonemal complexes are transported by the intraflagellar transport machinery. Jin was a 2022 BCMP Christopher Walsh Postdoctoral Fellow.
Matt received his Ph.D. from Boston University in 2022. With William Lehman, he used cryo-EM and molecular dynamics to understand the mechanisms of cardiac muscle contraction and the structural causes of cardiomyopathies. Matt joined the lab in September 2022 to study the regulation of ciliary motility. He was awarded a Merck Company Foundation Fellowship in 2023.
Raymond is an undergraduate studying chemistry at Harvard College. He joined the lab in September 2021 to study axoneme biogenesis. He hopes to start medical school in 2025.
Sven completed his Ph.D. with Sir Philip Cohen at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC PPU) in Dundee, Scotland, where he structurally characterized IRAK pseudokinases. Next, he did postdoctoral training with Yogesh Kulathu, also at the MRC PPU, working on branched ubiquitin chains and deubiquitinases. Sven joined the Brown lab in October 2022 to study ciliary trafficking. He was awarded a Sara Elizabeth O'Brien Trust Postdoc Fellowship in 2023.
Shimi received her Ph.D. from Pune University, India where she studied stress-induced regulation of protein synthesis in protozoan parasites. As a postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and later at Harvard Medical School, she worked on the characterization of translational initiation in Leishmania. Shimi joined the lab in 2019 as a Research Associate and works to understand the mechanisms of intraflagellar transport in Leishmania. In 2022, she determined the structure of the IFT-A complex.
Travis trained with Jack W. Szostak and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2019. In the Brown lab, Travis used cryo-EM to resolve the first structure of a microtubule-bound outer dynein arm (ODA) and used an integrative modeling approach to build a near-complete model of an axoneme from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Travis was named a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in 2019. He will start his own lab in the fall of 2024.
Haixia received her Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2019 where she studied SARS and MERS coronaviruses. Haixia joined the lab in September 2019 initially as a joint postdoc with Dr. Johannes Walter to determine the structure of CRL2Lrr1, the E3 ubiquitin ligase responsible for unloading CMG from replicated DNA. In the Brown lab, Haixia works on the structural basis of IFT. Haixia was a 2021 BCMP-Merck Postdoctoral Fellow.