Currently, we are a team of 13 members! Our lab is committed to personalized training and we welcome nontraditional backgrounds, support inclusive team environment, and are passionate advocates for LGBTQIA+, BLM and neurodiversity. Come join us!
Elizabeth Brunk, Phd (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.
Santiago Haase, PhD (He/him)
Bioinformatics Scientist with a doctoral degree in Molecular Biology and expertise in single cell sequencing and cancer biology. Santi specializes in computational analysis of single cell next generation sequencing and multiome data. With a background in cancer biology, he is interested in characterizing genomic and genetic heterogeneity across samples to determine characteristics of drug response.
Christina Gutierrez Ford, Phd (She/her)
Lab manager and research specialist with a doctoral degree in Pharmacology and expertise in microbiology and siRNA technologies. Working in the Brunk lab, Christina manages the wet-lab, and organizes all experiments and performs assays for various projects.
Oliver Cope (They/them)
Laboratory technician with an undergraduate degree in Biology. Working in the Brunk lab, Oliver developed primary cell culture skills performs cytogenetics assays, imaging and other molecular biology and functional genomics experiments. They are co-leading a project that integrates population ecology principles to better understand how cell-to-cell heterogeneity in karyotypes leads to fitness gains and selection outcomes. They plan to apply to graduate school to study ecology in 1-2 years.
Yue Wang (She/her)
5th year Pharmacology graduate student working towards a PhD degree (expected in 2024). Yue started research in the Brunk lab without any computational skills and is now close to completing a majorly computational PhD! Her work focuses on understanding heterogeneity in chromatin accessibility and RNA in cells with high levels of copy number variation. She has developed computational pipelines that analyze multiome (scRNA + scATAC) data. She is also working on characterizing global characteristics of breast cancer cell lines and tumors and comparing their salient molecular states to 3D models, such as organoids.
Jingting Chen (He/him)
3rd 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 small molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH) approaches to determine relationships between karyotype heterogeneity and RNA expression 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 the bioarchives.
Kriti Shukla (She/her)
2nd year Chemistry graduate student working toward a PhD degree. Kriti received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry with a minor in Math from UCLA, working with Ken Houk as an undergraduate researcher. Her work in the Brunk lab focuses on developing computational 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 describing these efforts which is currently in the bioarchives.
Nithya Gurumurthy (She/Her)
Post-baccalaureate research assistant. Nithya graduated in the Spring of 2023 with a bachelors in Neuroscience. She works in the Brunk lab part-time while also working as a Behavioral therapist for children with Autism. Working with the Brunk lab, she has developed primary cell culture skills and performs cytogenetic experiments and single nuclei imaging. She is co-leading a project with Oliver to characterize the changes in cell-to-cell karyotype heterogeneity over several generations. She plans to apply for medical school in the coming year.
Kohen Goble (He/him)
Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Chemistry (graduating Spring 2024). Kohen is working on an honors Chemistry thesis in the Brunk lab. He has organized a team of undergraduate CS majors at UNC (AI@UNC club) and is co-developing computational models to analyze karyotype images. His future plans are to attend graduate school.
William Dennis (He/him)
Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Chemistry (graduating Spring 2024). William is working on an honors Chemistry thesis in the Brunk lab. He has led several Fluorescence in situ Hybridization experiments to better understand how cells change their karyotypes in response to drugs and other perturbations. Willam plans to apply to graduate school and medical school after graduation.
Danielle Cannon (She/her)
Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Biology (graduating Spring 2024). Danielle is working on an honors Biology thesis in the Brunk lab. Danielle has been working to study genetic heterogeneity in the karyotypes of triple negative breast cancer cell lines. Danielle plans to apply to medical school after graduation.
Jacob Fessler (He/Him)
Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Computer Science (junior). Jacob has co-led a study in which online databases, vendor websites and literature was mined for karyotype data on thousands of cancer cell lines. He applied his programming skills to perform computational predictions of karyotype features on hundreds of cell lines and built a website to host this knowledge and data. He is co-first author on a paper describing these efforts, which is now in the bioarchives!
Aarav Mehta (He/Him)
Undergraduate research assistant majoring in Computer Science (junior). Aarav is interested in applying his computer science background to build machine learning models that predict karyotype features from flow cytometry and single cell imaging data. He is currently applying for a summer research fellowship program for Summer 2024!
Alumni and Previous Members
Stephanie Ting | Current UNC Chemistry graduate student in the Hoadley Lab.
Brunk Lab 
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