Norma Neff
Director, Genomics Platform
In 2007 I came to work with Rick Myers who was the Chairman of Genetics at Stanford on the ENCODE project. After Rick moved his lab to Alabama, I started working for Steve Quake who is now co-president of CZ Biohub. CZ Biohub is an opportunity to work with a lot of interesting, smart people and do exciting work. In academia, you can spend a lot of time worrying about one gene and how it’s behaving. I wanted to do more diagnostics and translational research. One of my jobs is to make the sequencing technology accessible to the academic community in the Bay Area. I look forward to interacting with all sorts of different people. We are on the hunt for researchers with unique collections of clinical samples. Maybe they have thought about sequencing them but never had the chance because it seems challenging and expensive. I like delivering sequence data to researchers, giving them an opportunity to look at their cells in a more unbiased and quantitative way. I continue to work at Stanford as well. I am responsible for single cell sequencing at both places. This includes working on the Cell Atlas project.
Maurizio Morri
Research and Operations Lab Manager, Stanford Biohub
Maurizio Morri received his PhD in Molecular Biology from the Institute of Science and Technology – Austria. He later moved to the Stanford University School of Medicine for a short postdoc in the department of Cardiovascular Medicine. He moved to the Biohub in April 2018, and from January 2019 he cover the role of lab manager of the Stanford Biohub. His main focus is on keeping the lab running, his lab mates happy and safe, and supervised many of the collaborations in the lab revolving around single cell technology. He is also the one that is going to shout on you if you do not wear proper PPE, but on the plus side he is going to make sure that there are snacks for everyone.
Feiqiao Brian Yu
Scientist II, Genomics Platform
(Biotechnology Systems Engineer)
Brian Yu received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and carried out his thesis research in Stephen Quake’s lab in Bioengineering at Stanford University, where he developed high-throughput microfluidic and sequencing technologies to study microbes. He also created Mini-Metagenomics, a microfluidic method to sequence and constructing genomes of novel bacterial organisms from mixed communities. At CZ Biohub, Brian collaborates with faculties from Stanford, UCSF, and Berkeley who make up the Biohub Microbiome Intercampus Initiative. His research focuses at the intersection of multi-omics and the human gut microbiome, inventing high-throughput experimental and data analysis platforms with the aim of understanding strain-strain and strain-nutrient interactions. As a member of the Genomics Platform, Brian actively incorporates new sequencing technologies that benefit Biohub’s central research aims. In addition, he builds, maintains, and updates user-facing computational infrastructure, enabling user interactions with genomic platform capabilities.
Jia Rose Yan
Research Associate II, Genomics Platform
Rose Yan received her B.S. in Microbiology and M.S. in Food Microbiology from University of California, Davis. She carried out her thesis research in the Robert Mondavi Institute, where she developed a methodology to study the survival of foodborne pathogens (Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, and E. coli) on coffee beans and in cold brew coffee. In her previous research, she also studied the effects of water saving AWD60 irrigation on the microbial communities associated with rice roots using 16S rRNA sequencing. At CZ Biohub, she works with internal and external collaborators to prepare DNA libraries and sequence samples on Illumina and nanopore platforms. She is also partially involved with the microbiome initiative at Stanford University and is interested in understanding community effects of the human gut microbiome.
Michelle Tan
Senior Research Associate, Genomics Platform
Michelle Tan received her B.S. in Biomolecular Engineering from University of California, Santa Cruz. After college she joined a cancer liquid biopsy start-up, first in the clinical laboratory then on the technology development team where she helped develop a blood test for monitoring cancer reoccurrence in patients. Also in this position, she gained hands on experience with different Illumina Sequencing systems, assay development on NGS library preparations, and automation experience. At CZ Biohub, she works closely with the cell atlas group and collaborates in atlas projects such as mouse aging cell atlas and more recently, the covid tissue atlas. She also participates in public health outreach program funded by the Gates Foundation, in which she teaches different labs across the world about Illumina Next Generation Sequencing. These labs use NGS technology to study and track infectious diseases. Lastly, she works with internal and external investigator groups who use sequencing as a tool in their research by answering NGS questions, advising library preparation, and sequencing samples (Illumina and PacBio). She is based in San Francisco.
Angela Detweiler
Scientist l, Genomics Platform
Angela Detweiler holds a B.S. in Ecology and Environmental Biology, and a M.S. in Biology. Prior to joining CZ Biohub in San Francisco, Angela spent the previous few years studying the structural and functional microbial diversity of complex hypersaline microbial mats at NASA Ames Research Center. She also collaborated on a spaceflight experiment and payload integration of MVP Cell-02 to assess the effects of microgravity and radiation on B. subtilis, which was delivered to the ISS on board a Space-X 18 Dragon capsule in July of 2019. Angela joined the Genomics Platform as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and jumped right into CZ Biohub’s CLIAhub and CA Covid Tracker efforts with a focus on library preparation optimization, scaling for high-throughput processing, quality control and whole genome sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. She oversees daily sequencing operations, performs short- and long-read sequencing on a variety of platforms (including PacBio, and Oxford Nanopore), and beta-tests novel sequencing technologies, protocols and workflows. In addition, Angela is part of a group of CZ Biohub scientists developing materials and providing NGS training to local and global health staff, aimed at facilitating pathogen detection and discovery in local and international communities.
Aditi Agrawal
Research Associate ll, Genomics Platform
Aditi Agrawal received her M.Sc. from Vellore Institute of Technology, India in Biomedical Genetics in 2009. She moved to the USA and received her M.S. from Iowa State University in Genetics and genomics in 2016 where she carried out her thesis research on “Focusing immune response on key neutralizing epitopes of HIV- 1 through immune complex vaccination” in Michael Cho’s lab. After graduating, she worked at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Immunotherapy Platform from 2016-2018, involving handling and processing clinical research samples from patients enrolled in clinical trials for various cancer treatments. She joined CZ Biohub in September 2018 as Research Associate II and carried out various projects in the Infectious disease initiative looking at functional characterization and lineage analysis of human broadly neutralizing antibodies against Dengue virus. She later moved to Cell Atlas initiative where she used single-cell RNAseq technologies to look at drug treatment response in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Organoids. She currently works in the Genomics Platform managing Stanford Biohub community access program along with Maurizio to provide training and support for 10x genomics and various single-cell RNAseq technologies to internal and external collaborators.
CZ Biohub at Stanford 