Alumni – The Bilder Lab

Post Docs

Katie Sharp

Katie Sharp

Katie comes to us from Stanford, where she studied planar cell polarity in Jeff Axelrod’s lab. Katie’s interests lie in the intersection of polarity and signaling in the cell and tissue organizational network. Katie’s research is supported by the American Heart Association. Katie became the Fellowship Manager at Activate.

Leigh Harris

Leigh Harris

Leigh received her Ph.D from Stanford, where she worked in Julie Theriot’s lab on mechanisms of bacterial size and shape control. She is now moving up the length-scale to study new mechanisms that regulate organ size. She is supported by a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship. Leigh is continuing her postdoctoral work in Valerie Weaver’s lab at UCSF.

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Justin Crest

Justin joins us from Bill Sullivan’s lab at UC-Santa Cruz, where he studied the cell biology of mitosis, including furrow positioning and centrosome separation. Justin is pursuing biomechanical approaches to investigate cell and organ morphogenesis, supported by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Justin went on to join Stanford Medical School as a Research Development Strategist.

Courtney Bone

Courtney conducted her thesis work with Daniel Starr at the University of California Davis. In the Starr lab she studied nuclear migration using the model, C. elegans. Courtney’s work in the lab centered on tissue interactions underlying organ formation. In Fall 2017, Courtney started work at Genentech.

Lara Skwarek

Lara received her Ph.D. training at the University of Toronto, studying the regulation of Notch signaling by phosphoinositides and membrane trafficking in the laboratory of Gabrielle Boulianne. For this work, Lara was given the Margaret Thompson PhD Thesis Award in 2010 from the Genetics Society of Canada. Lara investigated mechanisms of polarity regulation and their links to the control of organ growth as well as a new model for epithelial remodeling in vivo. Lara moved on to work with Affinergy in North Carolina.

Lucy O’Brien

Lucy joined us from Keith Mostov’s group at UCSF, where she used cultured epithelial cells to investigate questions of cell polarity and morphogenesis. Here, she turned to a stem-cell based Drosophila epithelium, the intestinal lining of the adult midgut, as a system to explore the regulatory interface of stem cell and epithelial tissue biology. Lucy was supported by a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship and a KO1 Award. In 2012 she opened her lab at Stanford Medical School.

Sally Horne-Badovinac

Sally came to the Bilder lab from Didier Stainier’s lab at UCSF, where she studied polarity and morphogenesis of zebrafish organs. Sally’s interests include the molecular mechanisms of epithelial morphogenesis, particularly their developmental implications. Starting fall 2008, Sally started her own lab at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor.

Anne Classen

Anne trained as a graduate student in Suzanne Eaton’s lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, studying protein trafficking and tissue morphogenesis. Her work in the lab explored epigenetic mechanisms of tumor suppression. Anne was awarded a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund fellowship. Starting in the spring of 2011, Anne started her own lab at the Ludwig-Maximilans-University of Munich, now at Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg.

Thomas Vaccari

Thomas recieved his Ph.D. from EMBL, where he worked on the role of Par-1 in cell polarity in Anne Ephrussi’s lab. After four years as a postdoc in the Bilder lab, Thomas moved back to Europe and is now focusing on the regulation of Notch signaling and tumor suppression by endocytosis. He is currently a group leader at University of Milan.

Graduate Students

Mark Khoury

Mark comes to the lab from NYU, where he trained in the Klann lab studying neurodevelopmental disorders. Mark is interested in new mechanisms regulating epithelial polarity and endocytic traffic. Mark is supported by the American Heart Association.

Geert de Vreede

Geert received his Ph.D. from Utrecht University, carrying out his research in the Bilder lab while keeping in touch with Sander van den Heuvel back in the Netherlands. Geert’s work focused on discovering new molecules and mechanisms that control epithelial polarity and tumor suppression. Geert now works for Zeiss Microscopy.

Dong-Yuan Chen

With a Masters Degree from the Guang-Chao Chen’s lab (Academia Sinica) at National Taiwan University, Dong-Yuan comes to the Bilder lab with an interests in using imaging-based technologies to study epithelial polarity and morphogenesis. In 2019 Dong-Yuan started a postdoc with Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz at Caltech.

Katherine Lipari