Lab Alumni

Tristan McPhail

• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, 2025
  • Thesis: Directed Evolution of Peptide-Based Therapeutics and Diagnostics for Huntington’s Disease via mRNA Display

Justin Ong

• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, 2024
  • Thesis: Engineering Proteins for Cancer Applications using mRNA Display

Kaori Noridomi

• Postdoc, 2022

William Evenson

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2021
  • Thesis: The Selective Targeting of Ras: A Tale of Kinetics, mRNA Display, and Vaccines

Golnaz Kamalinia

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2020

John Mac

• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, 2019 (Co-advised with Dr. Pin Wang)
  • Thesis: Engineering Therapeutics for the Improved Antitumor Efficacy of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cell Therapy

Lan Huong Lai

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2016
  • Thesis: Customization of the mRNA Display Cycle – From Protease Resistance to High Throughput Analysis of Peptide Ligands

Aaron Nichols

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2016
  • Thesis: mRNA Display as a Method to Generate Stable Fibronectin Ligands for the Alpha 1 Subunit of the Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor

Mehmet Çetin

• Ph.D. Molecular and Computational Biology, 2015
  • Thesis: Generation of Disulfide-Free Antibody Mimetics Against the RAS Protein

Farzad Jalali–Yazdi

• Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, 2015
  • Thesis: Generation and Characterization of Peptide Theranostics by mRNA Display

Shannon Howell

• Postdoc, 2015
• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2014
  • Thesis: Directed Evolution of High Affinity, Cyclic, Protease Resistant Peptides Using mRNA Display

Kuo-Chan Hung

• Ph.D. Genetic, Molecular, and Cellular Biology, 2012
  • Thesis: Developing Peptide and Antibody-Mimetic Ligands for the Cell Surface Receptor Beta2AR and DC-SIGN

Stephen Fiacco

• Postdoc
• Ph.D., Chemistry, 2012
  • Thesis: Directed Evolution Provides Stable, Cell Permeable, Efficacious, and Orally Bioavailable Peptidomimetics

Terry Takahashi

• Postdoc, 2010
• Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, 2005 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: In Vitro Selection of RNA Binding Peptides

Anders Olson

• Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, 2008 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: mRNA Display Selection Using a Combinatorial 10FnIII Protein Library for Detection and Modulation of Cellular Processes

Steven Millward

• Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, 2007 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: The Design, Synthesis, and Evolution of Macrocyclic mRNA Display Libraries Containing Unnatural Amino Acids

Ryan Austin

• Ph.D., 2007 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Solving Molecular Recognition Problems with Evolvable Peptide Motifs

Christine Ueda

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2006 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Targeting Human Telomerase via Biochemical and In Vitro Selection Methods

William W. Ja

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2005 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Peptide Modulators of G Protein Signaling

Xin Qi

• Ph.D. Bioorganic, 2005 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Unnatural Amino Acid Incorporation to Rewrite the Genetic Code and RNA-peptide Interactions

Tianbing Xia

• Postdoc, 2005 (California Institute of Technology)

Shelley R. Starck

• Ph.D. Chemistry, 2004 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Exploring the Proteome: Insights into Eukaryotic Protein Synthesis Using Puromycin Analogs

Adam Frankel

• Postdoc, 2004 (California Institute of Technology)

Jinsong Ren

• Postdoc

Shuwei Li

• Ph.D., 2003 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: In Vitro Selection of mRNA-Display Libraries Containing Unnatural Amino Acids

Niki Zacharias

• Postdoc, 2003 (California Institute of Technology)

Todd Thorsen

• Ph.D. Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, 2002 (California Institute of Technology)
  • Thesis: Microfluidic Technologies for High-Throughput Screening Applications

Quan Chen

• Postdoc