Meet the team

Executive Director and Core Investigator

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.

Cofounder and Core Investigator

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.

Core Investigator

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.

Core Investigator

Luke Gilbert is an Associate 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.

Core Investigator

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. Hani will begin his Core Investigator role at Arc in January 2024.

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.