Meet the team

Core Investigators

Arc Core Investigators are fully funded with complete freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research agendas. They may also hold faculty positions at our partner institutions - Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF.

Silvana Konermann
Executive Director and Core Investigator

Silvana Konermann

Silvana is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford. Her research laboratory aims to understand the molecular pathways that drive the development of Alzheimer’s disease using next-generation functional genomics, with the long-term goal of developing rationally targeted therapeutics for neurodegenerative disorders. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from MIT. Silvana’s pioneering work on tools to directly perturb the transcriptomic landscape of the cell using CRISPR has been recognized by her faculty appointment as a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and Hanna Gray Fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Patrick Hsu
Cofounder and Core Investigator

Patrick Hsu

Patrick Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Deb Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. His lab develops molecular technologies to improve human health through next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics. Patrick received A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and the Broad Institute, where he helped to pioneer CRISPR-Cas9 technologies for genome editing. His research has been recognized in Forbes' 30 Under 30, the NIH Early Independence Award, the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, the Rainwater Prize for Innovative Early Career Scientist, and the Amgen Young Investigator Award.

Lingyin Li
Core Investigator

Lingyin Li

Lingyin Li is an Associate Professor in the Biochemistry Department and the ChEM-H institute at Stanford. She received her Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Laura Kiessling and performed postdoctoral studies with Dr. Timothy Mitchison at Harvard Medical School. The Li Laboratory has pioneered the development of chemical tools to define and manipulate new modulators of the innate immune STING pathway. Dr. Li is the recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award in 2017, the Ono Pharma Foundation Breakthrough Science Initiative Award in 2017, and the 2022 Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry.

Luke Gilbert
Core Investigator

Luke Gilbert

Luke Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Urology and of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, and is affiliated with the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Innovative Genomics Institute. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and completed his postdoctoral training at UCSF. Dr. Gilbert was an early pioneer in applying CRISPR technology to edit the epigenome (CRISPRi and CRISPRa), and continues to develop new strategies for editing and understanding human genetics and epigenetics at large scale, with a particular focus on cancer. Dr. Gilbert’s research has been recognized by a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Pew-Stewart scholar for cancer research award, and the AAAS Martin and Rose Wachtel Cancer research award.

Hani Goodarzi
Core Investigator

Hani Goodarzi

Hani received his Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology at Princeton University. He is an Associate Professor for the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He has received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise and the AACR-MPM Transformative Cancer Research Award. He is also a past recipient of the Martin and Rose Wachtel Award in Cancer Research and an American Cancer Society scholar. Hani has led his own research group at UCSF since 2016, working at the intersection of machine learning and cancer biology. His team brings together a mix of students and researchers across a range of backgrounds and experiences to tackle fundamental challenges facing life sciences. In a number of studies, his lab has used computational tools to show how RNA-encoded information is over-written by cancer cells to drive pathological progression of this disease. These discoveries have uncovered new ways through which we can target human cancers.

Science Fellows

Arc Science Fellows are outstanding early career scientists who have the vision and exceptional track record to transition into a principal investigator role directly after doctoral training.

Jingtian Zhou
Science Fellow

Jingtian Zhou

Jingtian recently received his Ph.D. through the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. from Tsinghua University in 2016 and joined the Salk Institute’s Ecker lab in summer 2017, where he explored the gene regulation landscape of the mammalian brain through integrative analysis of multimodality single-cell data. At Arc, he will continue to develop single-cell high-throughput technologies and computational tools in his own lab, to come up with more diverse types of data and analyses for quantitative modeling of gene expression dynamics.

Technology Centers

Arc Technology Centers are biotech-like R&D hubs that focus on technology invention, refinement, and benchmarking in five technological areas: Multi-Omics, Genome Engineering, Cellular Models, Mammalian Models and Computation. In parallel, they partner with our Core Investigators and their labs to unlock new discoveries across human complex diseases. You can learn more about our Technology Centers here.

Nianzhen Li
MULTI-OMICS

Nianzhen Li

Nianzhen leads Arc’s Multi-Omic Technology Center. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Iowa State University followed by post-doctoral research in Bioengineering at University of Washington. She started her career at Fluxion Biosciences and has held various leadership positions at Fluidigm, Mission Bio, and Deepcell.

Ben Mijts
GENOME ENGINEERING

Ben Mijts

Ben leads Arc’s Genome Engineering Technology Center. He received his Ph.D. from Griffith University in Australia and completed his Post-doctoral research at the University of Minnesota. He started his industry career as a scientist at Codexis, developing enzymes for pharmaceutical and biofuels applications. He was an early employee at Zymergen, transitioning to a technical leadership role as Director of Projects. Most recently he was Senior Director of Protein Engineering at Inscripta, developing genome editing tools including novel CRISPR nucleases.

Operations

The Arc Operations team provides the necessary infrastructure and support so that our scientists have the space to focus on tackling their most important ideas.

Nat Friedman
Board member

Nat Friedman

Nat was the CEO of GitHub and the cofounder and CEO of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft). Nat also cofounded the GNOME Foundation, an organization to support the GNOME project goals of an open source computing platform.

Alden Woodrow
COO

Alden Woodrow

Alden leads operations at Arc. He has built teams and technologies in various industries including energy, aerospace, and transportation. Previously Alden held product management roles at Nuro, Uber, Google, Makani, and was the co-founder and CEO of Ike.

Julia Kazaks
General Counsel

Julia Kazaks

Julia leads the legal team at Arc. She brings leadership experience from public company executive roles and two decades of work at Skadden.

Lynn Hendrickson
University Relations & Academic Affairs

Lynn Hendrickson

Lynn leads university partnerships for the Institute. Previous to Arc, Lynn held roles at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Addgene, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Bill Kim
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Bill Kim

Bill leads the intellectual property function at Arc. He brings over twenty years of legal experience in life science IP matters, most recently at 10x Genomics and before that at WilmerHale, where Bill was a partner. Before law, Bill was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics & Immunology at The Rockefeller University and he obtained his Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular, & Biophysical Studies from Columbia University.

Jessica Adkins
BRAND & COMMUNICATIONS

Jessica Adkins

Jessica leads brand, as well as external and internal communicatons at Arc. She brings extensive experience from the consumer products and health industries, including AB InBev and Amy's Kitchen.

Nicolle Seuss
Systems

Nicolle Seuss

Nicolle leads operations projects across operational systems at the Institute. She comes from Director roles at two Fortune 100 Insurance carriers.

Rose Harris
Finance

Rose Harris

Rose leads finance operations for the Institute. Formerly, Rose worked in the healthcare sector, most recently as a Vice President at Aetna.