Team

Elizabeth Brunk, Ph.D. (She/her)

Principal Investigator. Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Department of Chemistry. Faculty in the Integrated Program for Biological Genome Sciences (iBGS). Member of UNC Lineberger Cancer Center and the Computational Medicine Program. Affiliate of the Carolina Applied Math Program.

Yue Wang (She/her)

Pharmacology graduate student who defended her dissertation in December 2025. Yue transferred into the Brunk lab in 2021 without any computational skills and has now defended a majorly computational PhD! Her work focused on understanding heterogeneity in chromatin accessibility and RNA in cells with high levels of copy number variation. She has developed computational pipelines that analyze single cell multiomincs (scRNA + scATAC) data. She also worked on characterizing global characteristics of breast cancer cell lines and tumors and comparing their salient molecular states to 3D cell models, such as organoids.

Jingting Chen (He/him)

Fourth year Biochemistry and Biophysics student working toward a PhD degree. Jingting applies cutting-edge experimental techniques to characterize karyotypes of cells with high decree of genetic heterogeneity. He has developed many of the lab’s cytogenetic protocols and is currently working to integrate this data with single cell sequencing approaches to determine relationships between karyotype heterogeneity, RNA expression and chromatin accessibility in single cell resolution. He is co-first author on a publication describing a novel protocol for visualizing chromosomal aberrations using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), which can be found in Biotechniques!

Kriti Shukla (She/her)

Fourth-year Chemistry graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Kriti received her B.S. in Chemistry and Applied Math from UCLA. Her work in the Brunk lab focuses on developing computational and machine learning methods to survey genomic variants and determine their impact of genome functioning at large. She has integrated data from the Dependency Map, with three dimensional protein structural data, pooled CRISPR screens, and multiplex assays for variant effects (MAVE) data. She is first author on a manuscript that was accepted in ACS JCIM in 2024, and another manuscript that was accepted to CTS in 2025. This second manuscript was awarded the PhRMA Foundation Trainee Challenge Award and selected as CTS’s Paper of the Month for Feb 2026!

Jonnathan Castro (He/him)

Second year Chemistry graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Jonnathan received his B.S. in Chemistry from Yachay Tech University. His work in the Brunk lab focuses on developing computational and machine learning methods to survey genomic variants and determine their impact on drug response. He has integrated data from the Dependency Map, with three dimensional protein structural data, and pooled drug screens.

Molly Murray (She/hers)

Second year Chemistry graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Molly received her B.S. in Chemistry and Psychology from Fordham University. Her work in the Brunk lab focuses on characterizing drug response and resistance mechanisms in ecDNA.

Anna Ebacher (She/hers)

Second year Pharmacology graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Anna received her B.S. in Biochemistry and Neuroscience from Tulane University. Her work in the Brunk lab focuses on characterizing the relationship between ecDNA and immune response in cancer.

Chaeyeon (Chloe) Sung (She/hers)

First year Chemistry graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Chloe received her B.S. in Chemistry from NYU. Her work in the Brunk lab focuses on characterizing ecDNA and developing new model systems for ecDNA study.

Adesuwa Igbinigie (She/her)

Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Quantitative Biology (junior). Adesuwa is planning on an honors Biology thesis in the Brunk lab. She has been working to study genetic heterogeneity in the karyotypes of triple negative breast cancer cell lines.

Emma Whitman (She/her)

Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Chemistry (junior). Emma is gaining both computational and experimental molecular biology skills. She is helping on a translational project entailing patient data and HER2 amplifications.

Darby Chen (She/her)

Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Chemistry (junior). Darby has been working to study genetic heterogeneity in the karyotypes of cancer cell lines. She is a co-author on a manuscript that is under review and in the biorxiv!

Xinyi (Celia) Li (She/her)

Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Statistics (junior). Celia’s project involves studying patterns in the open chromatin accessibility of patient samples to determine aberrations in their chromosomal content. She is also helping on a translational project entailing patient data and HER2 amplifications.

Poorya Behnamie (He/him)