Principal Investigator
David Bilder
David joined the Berkeley faculty in 2002, after completing postdoctoral work with Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School and graduate work with Matt Scott at Stanford Medical School. He is a member of the CDB and affiliate of GGD divisions, and an organizer of the DRB group. Research in David’s lab has been supported by the Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation, the Searle Scholars Program, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Cancer Institute, the Mizutani Glycoscience Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. In 2010, David was awarded the HW Mossman Developmental Biologist Award. David was elected President of the North American Drosophila Board in 2015, and is the Founder and Chair of the Drosophila Image Award.
Postdocs
Hui-Yu Ku
Ku arrives in the Bilder lab from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, where she studied the interface of cell signaling and morphogenesis with Henry Sun. Here, Ku is investigating how cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions shape organs.
Katy Ong
Katy completed her doctoral work in Steve DiNardo’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied cell mechanics and signaling in the context of epithelial morphogenesis. For her postdoctoral work, she is working to identify the long-range signaling mechanisms between tumor and host cells that underlie paraneoplastic effects. Katy is supported by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.
Stephan Gerlach
Stephan joins us from the University of Copenhagen, where he trained with Hector Herranz studying tissue growth and its regulation by miRNAs and genome instability. He has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Research Fund Denmark to understand inflammatory networks in flies under both physiological and pathological conditions.
Yoshiki Sakai
Yoshiki completed his graduate work studying axon regeneration in C. elegans with Drs. Naoki Hisamoto & Kunihiro Matsumoto at Nagoya University, Japan. In the Bilder lab, Yoshiki studies tumor-immune interactions in flies.
Graduate students
Kavya Adiga
Kavya is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where she worked with Ken Cadigan on Wnt signaling. She now studies tumor-host interactions in the lab.
Jan Mikhale Cajulao
Jan received his B.S. and M.S. from San Francisco State University, where he studied host-pathogen interactions and GPCR trafficking under Dr. Lily Chen as an undergrad and Dr. Erica L. Sanchez as a master’s student. He is the newest graduate student and is studying the role of aging in cancer in the adult fly.
Technician
Sofia Mendez Lopez
Sofia graduated from the University of Toronto where she trained with Dr. Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalez studying collective cell migration in embryonic wound healing. She is now investigating the adult fruit fly’s systemic response to wounds.
Undergrads
Matin Nawabi
Karina Anders