Welcome Morgan, Bonnie, Ben and Huarui!

Wow! We have had a recent influx of new folks to the lab.

Morgan Stilgenbauer joined the lab in early 2021. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from Kent State where she worked on novel cisplatin molecules through the lenses of chemistry, biochemistry, and cancer cell biology. She will be joining a Koch-Pfizer project team focused on a suite of historically challenging targets and road-testing new industry-academic training models. She has also worked on targeting UPS machinery related to MYC post-translational stability.

Bonnie Su joined the lab in the summer of 2021 as a new graduate student from the Department of Biology. Prior to MIT, Bonnie earned her Bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology with Honors and High Distinction. She also minored in Bioengineering, making her a great fit for MIT! After graduation, she worked at ViewPoint Therapeutics, building skill sets in assay development and biophysics with a view toward impacting diseases of vision, including cataracts and presbyopia. We think she will be our lab’s new biophysics and structural biology whiz kid.

Benjamin Leu joined the lab in August 2021 as a research technical associate and SMM specialist. Ben will be the ultimate lab node, interacting with folks to make and screen SMMs across a variety of targets. Ben comes to us from UT Austin, where he recently graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry.

Huarui Cui joined the lab in September 2021 and comes to us from Will Pomerantz’s lab at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities as a recently hooded Chemistry PhD. Huarui will join Morgan in the quest to tackle oncogenic transcription factors like MYC and MYB by interfering with UPS. Her previous experience working on BET bromodomain inhibitors will certainly come in handy. As our lab has an affinity for graduates from Minnesota, she will have some big shoes to fill of one Nick Struntz, now at GSK. No pressure, ha ha.