We are a diverse group of scientists with experience ranging from biochemistry, to instrumentation, to hard-core physics. Below you can read more about individuals in our lab, as well as our collaborators at other institutions.

Jens started his career at the University of Washington studying nuclear physics (PhD, 1990) then became a gravitatioal physicist. He stumbled upon nanopore sequencing seven years ago and really wanted to try this out himself. When his then-gravity student Tom Butler heard about the idea, he came aboard, our project was born and the enthusiasm could not be stopped anymore. Jens now splits his time and runs two labs: his gravity group, and our nanopore physics group. That makes our lab an especially diverse and entertaining place to work.

Ian Derrington graduated in 2005 from the University of Colorado, Boulder with degrees in Applied Mathematics, and Summa Cum-Laude in Engineering Physics. Since late 2006 he has pursued his doctoral research with the group helping to design and test and MspA for DNA sequencing. His first publication with the group is also our first paper in PNAS! It can be found here or here.

Physics graduate student Liz Manrao, joined the group in autumn 2008. Liz got her undergraduate degree from university of XXX.

A third year undergraduate in Biochemsitry, Kyle is our primary lab tech. He keeps us running with day-to-day prep work but is also pursuing his own scientific project to study how longer stretches of DNA pass through MspA.

David is an undergraduate in Physics. He joined the group in autumn 2008 and is working with Ian and Marcus to develop new data analysis techniques.

Jeney is an undergraduate physics major here at UW, and a biology major at Seattle Pacific University, minoring in chemistry. She's the president of the Society of Physics Students, and the Outreach Coordinator of the Undergraduate Women in Physics group. She plans to attend graduate school in biophysics within a year, and enjoys staying active outdoors in her free time.

Dr. Troll helped Tom and Jens found the nanopore group. With his extensive knowledge of biochemistry and microbiology, he kept the physicists in the group grounded in the realm of biology. He is now CEO and President of Aaron Thermionics working on really (controlable) cool stuff but still finds time to help advise the group in scientific matters.

Dr. Niederweiss is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has isolated MSPA out of its native biological enironment and is now modifying it for this project. His publications on MspA, including the Science article describing the structure, can be found at PubMed.

Mikhail is a research scientist at UAB helping with the development of MSPA for use in DNA sequencing.

Alek is an alumni of Klaus Schulten's world-leading molecular dynamics simulation group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is now Professor of Physics there. He has developed new methods for the study of DNA and polymer transport through nanopores. He joined our collaboration in autumn 2008 to simulate MspA for rapid testing of new MspA design ideas. Some of Alek's work can be found by following this link.

Meredith was an undegraduate physics student with us in 2008

In 2006 Lia was an REU student from Middlebury College in Vermont. After spending her summer with our group she wrote a pretty amazing undergraduate thesis about conductance in MspA. Lia is now a graduate student in biophysics at UC Berkeley.

In 2005 Hannah was our first REU student. She came from Dartmouth College. After graduating she signed up for Teach for America (Germantown High School) but she will now begin graduate school in Physics.

Ryan was an Amgen Scholar from Reed College, who spent his 2008 summer with us debugging and testing our new ultra-low noise voltage clamp amplifier.

Mats was an undergraduate student with us working on modeling and visualizing DNA translocations through nanopores.

Ian was an Amgen Scholar from Birmingham University, and spent his 2009 summer helping to implement microfluidic systems, and improve bilayer-making techniques for the lab.