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 Scholar in 2019. He was promoted to Associate Professor in January 2023.
Jacob received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 2017. He is a Chemical Biology student in Harvard's MD-PhD program. Before graduate school, Jacob worked in Nils Walter's laboratory using TIRF microscopy to measure kinetics of oligonucleotide binding and in Adriaan Bax's laboratory measuring rates of hydrogen exchange of backbone amides in intrinsically disordered proteins. Jacob joined the lab in May 2020 and works on mammalian cilia. Jacob received an NIH F30 Award in 2022 for his work on von Willebrand factor.
Jin Dai joined the lab in August 2021 and was the first member to join from another cilia lab. Jin obtained his B.Sc. from Peking University, Beijing, before moving to the U.S. for a Ph.D. with Dr. Karl Lechtreck. In his research with Karl, Jin studied how axonemal dyneins are transported by intraflagellar transport. Jin was a 2022 BCMP Christopher Walsh Postdoctoral Fellow.
Matt received his Ph.D. from the Boston University School of Medicine in 2022. His graduate work in the laboratory of William Lehman focused on using cryo-EM and molecular dynamics to understand the mechanisms of cardiac muscle contraction and the structural causes of muscle disorders such as cardiomyopathies. Matt joined the lab in September 2022 and will study the regulation of axonemal dyneins. Matt was awarded a Merck Company Foundation Fellowship in 2023.
Raymond is an undergraduate studying chemistry at Harvard College, with a particular interest in medicine and the life sciences. He joined the lab in September 2021.
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 and thereby returned to his ciliary roots, as he had previously explored ciliary trafficking complexes during his Master's thesis in the lab of Alfred Wittinghofer at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany.
Shimi received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Biotechnology, 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 complexes in Leishmania. Shimi joined the lab in 2019 as a Research Associate and works on understanding the mechanisms of intraflagellar transport (IFT) in Leishmania tarentolae. In 2022, she published the structure of the IFT-A complex.
Travis received his PhD from Harvard University in 2019 by uncovering a novel chemical mechanism for nonenzymatic RNA polymerization in the laboratory of Jack W. Szostak. Before his doctoral training, he studied transcriptional regulation during C. elegans development using microscopic and genomic approaches in the laboratory of John I. Murray at the University of Pennsylvania. Travis is continuing his scientific training in the Brown lab with biochemical and structural studies of axonemal dyneins and axonemes. Travis is a 2019 Helen Hay Whitney Fellow.
Haixia received her Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2019. She worked on isolating and characterizing new monoclonal antibodies against the MERS-CoV infection by combining cryo-EM, X-ray crystallography, and biochemistry. Haixia joined the lab in September 2019 as a joint postdoc with Dr. Johannes Walter. Haixia's first project with the Walter lab was to determine the cryo-EM 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.