Former Lab Members

Max joined our lab after graduating with a degree from Vassar in biochemistry. After a gap year in our lab he moved on to graduate school.

Gabby joined the lab as a research technician after graduating from Brandeis University in 2021.  Gabby is now in the MD/PhD program at SUNY Downstate Medical School.  When not doing science, she's an amazing singer and musician.

Kai majored in Physics at Princeton University, graduating in 2022.  He spend one year with us learning a lot of molecular biology while helping us work on our single molecule studies of transcription.  In 2003 he joined the PhD program in the Harvard Physics Department. 

Inwha completed her undergraduate and master’s studies at Seoul National University, graduating summa cum laude. She was a PhD student in the BBS program at HMS and her dissertation encompassed single molecule studies of RNA Polymerase II transcription. Outside of lab she likes to watch Netflix and play boardgames. She also likes to travel whenever she has time.  After graduation, she moved to New York City for postdoctoral work with Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University. In 2023, she took a position as an Assistant Professor at Kyung Hee University back home in Korea.

Deepash earned his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science in India on the Cohesin complex. His project in the Buratowski lab uses mass spectrometry to study CTD phosphorylation. In his free time, he enjoys films and playing cricket.

Sarah did her PhD at Monash University in Australia, working on the general transcription factor TFIID. In the Buratowski lab, she was using single molecule microscopy to study transcription initiation. She has a passion for savory donuts and all things fermentation! Currently Sarah is at Civetta Therapeutics.

Charlotte graduated summa cum laude from Wellesley College in 2019 as a premed Spanish major. In the Buratowski lab she extends her love of organic chemistry to biological systems. She is also passionate about sewing and is vegan. In 2021, Charlotte left to lab to begin her MD training at Northwestern University.

Adam is from Greece and studied at the University of Crete. He then moved to Oxford University, where he did his Master's degree with (former Buratowski lab member) Lidia Vasilieva and his PhD with Nick Proudfoot.  In the Buratowski lab he worked on the PAF complex, supported by an EMBO Long Term Fellowship. He is currently working for Saliogen Therapeutics.

Nathan joined the lab in 2021 after getting his degree in Biophysics from Brandeis University.  He's worked as a research technician supporting our single molecule microscopy team.  Like several of our other lab members, he's also musician, but the only one that plays the tuba!

Hyun Jin did his PhD at Catholic University in South Korea on connections between microRNAs and cancer. While in the Buratowski lab, he was supported by a fellowship from the Korea National Research Foundation. His work involved developing new mass spectrometry methods to analyze patterns of CTD phosphorylation, and how the CTD interacts with the histone H3K4 methyltransferase Set1/COMPASS. He's now working for  Korean biopharma company LegoChem Biosciences developing anti-cancer drugs that target transcription.

Yujin worked on many, many projects while in the lab....and always with a smile!  She got her master's degree at Korea University.  She is now a Senior Researcher at CJ Cheiljedang, the leading Korean producer of nutraceuticals and nutritional supplements.

Yoo Jin did his PhD work at Korea University where he studied gene expression in yeast. In the Buratowski lab, he created an in vitro system for studying transcription elongation, CTD phosphorylation, and chromatin interactions. He used this system to carry out quantitative proteomic analysis of RNA polymerase II transcription complexes.  Yoo Jin is now Chief Research Scientist at TiumBio Co., Ltd., developing drugs for diseases caused by defects in transcription.

David did his PhD at KAIST, working on interactions between the proteasome and gene expression. He was in the Buratowski lab for only a short time, but contributed to our single molecule studies of transcription. He is currently studying viruses at UCSD.

Luis is from Lisbon, Portugal. He received his PhD degree from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lisbon, for his work in splice site recognition done both in Heidelberg, Germany and Barcelona, Spain. In the Buratowski lab he studied  the mechanisms of histone H3 K4 methylation.  Luis is also an expert on the computational analysis and representation of genomic data. He is currently a Senior Bioinformatician for Foghorn Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. Luis's LinkedIn profile. 

Hyunsuk did his PhD work at Seoul National University. At HMS, he worked on the RNA polymerase II CTD, showing it can be transferred to other polymerase subunits and performing a detailed mass spectrometry analysis of phosphorylation patterns. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Pfizer. Hyunsuk's LinkedIn profile.

Dane got his PhD at Brown University studying lambda phage integrase. In the Buratowski lab he was supported by an American Cancer Society Fellowship and studied the interplay between transcription elongation and termination. After spending several years as a research scientist at the Broad Institute/Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, he became a Senior Scientist at Vor Biopharma, where he works on engineering human stem cells for cancer therapies. Dane's LinkedIn profile.

Cody is from Michigan and is majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard College. His research studying co-transcriptional histone methylation won two awards: the Henderson Prize for the outstanding thesis in the department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Hoopes Prize, given to the top theses from that year's graduating class. After graduation, Cody is attending medical school at the University of Chicago. Cody's LinkedIn profile. 

Jieun got her bachelor's degree from University of Wisconsin and her PhD from Seoul National University. She is interested in transcription elongation and termination.

Susanna is a Professor at the Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe in Valencia, Spain. She spent six months in 2015 in the lab on sabbatical, supported by a Fulbright Scholar award. Her lab studies the interactions between transcription and mRNA export. She is an avid runner, and she describes her running experiences in Boston in this article.

Sebastian did his PhD on Arabidopsis gene expression with Caroline Dean at the John Innes Centre in England. In the Buratowski lab he studied the expression of cryptic non-coding RNAs and divergent promoters. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Plant Science Centre. Sebastian has received an ERC Starting Grant (2017) an EMBO Young Investigator Award (2019).  Marquardt Lab Webpage.

Wiebke got her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where she worked on identifying the target RNAs for Nrd1 and other RNA binding proteins. She studied the interactions of proteins with the nascent transcript. Wiebke's LinkedIn profile.

Tim is from New Jersey and received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. Tim was co-advised by Jarrod Marto at Dana Farber Cancer Institute studied transcription initiation complexes using quantitative mass spectrometry.  After graduating he joined the postdoctoral fellows program at Glaxo Smith Kline in Pennsylvania, where he is now an Investigator. Tim's LinkedIn profile.

Nihal  earned her B.S. in molecular biology and genetics from Bilkent University, Turkey, in 2005.  In the Buratowski Lab, she studied the interactions between histone modifications and transcription termination.  After graduating in 2011 she joined Stuart Orkin's lab as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2016 she moved back home and is now an assistant professor at Middle East Technical University.

Miriam did her PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her postdoctoral work addressed the role of the mRNA binding protein Npl3 in mRNA termination and export. She spent time on the faculty at UMass Medical School in Worcester and is currently an editor at the Journal of Molecular Biology. Miriam's LinkedIn profile.

Minkyu Kim earned his PhD from Seoul National University where he studied DNA damage response in fission yeast. His research in the Buratowski lab focused on how eukaryotic RNA polymerase II terminates transcription. After leaving the Buratowski lab, Minkyu was an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University until 2015, when he joined the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UCSF. Minkyu's UCSF profile

Vlad was a plant scientist in Russia before moving to the US. He was an invaluable member of our lab for many, many years. He's currently enjoying spending his retirement with his grandchildren.

Currently a faculty member in the Dept. of Biochemistry, Oxford University, Lidia is from Krasnoyarsk, a very beautiful city in the middle of Siberia, Russia. She earned a Masters of Science from the Institute of Protein Research, RAN, in Pushchino, Russia. She went on to earn a PhD from the University of Helsinki, where she studied the replication of positive strand RNA viruses. Her work in the Buratowski lab connected RNA synthesis and termination to quality control by the exosome.

Jessica obtained her B.A. in Biology-Chemistry from Scripps College in Claremont, CA in 2001.   Her work focused on studying the regulation of RNA polymerase II elongation, more specifically the role of the Paf1 complex as well as the SR protein, Npl3. After graduation, Jessica did postdoctoral work at Stanford and is currently Director of R&D Science at the company ProteinSimple.  Jessica's LinkedIn profile.

Michael started out working on CTD kinases, but this led to his pioneering work on histone modifying enzymes. In 2006 Michael started his own lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and more recently he became the Chief Scientific Officer of the epigenetics company EpiCypher. Michael's LinkedIn profile.

Marie-France did her PhD at the Institut de recherches cliniques de MontrŽeal on RNA polymerase II and was awarded a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship.  She stayed at Harvard only one year, but during that short time met John Pascal, who is now her husband. They moved to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where together they've been doing outstanding work on DNA repair enzymes.  More recently, they've moved to the University of Montreal.

Tom did his PhD at SUNY Albany and then did a short postdoc in the Buratowski lab. He has since taught at UMass, Delaware State University, and Bay Path University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Tom's LinkedIn profile.

Seong-Hoon studied at Sungkyunkwon University before coming to the Buratowski Lab for postdoctoral work. He was a key part of our team that discovered how the RNA polymerase II CTD is used to couple transcription with mRNA processing and chromatin modifying enzymes. He is now a full Professor at Hanyang University back home in Korea.

Roy came to the lab after doing his undergraduate work at Oxford. After graduation he did postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and then moved into industry. He has worked at Pfizer, Genentech, and currently works at Roche. Roy's LinkedIn profile.

Chika did her PhD at Tokyo Institute of Technology. At Harvard she studied the bromodomain proteins Bdf1 and Bdf2 and how they are regulated by phosphorylation. She is currently on the faculty of Showa University School of Medicine. Chika's LinkedIn profile.

Dervla did her undergraduate thesis in the lab, working with grad student Roy Auty on the basal transcription machinery. After graduation, she got her PhD from UCSF, did a postdoc at Tufts, and is currently a Senior Scientist at Kintai Therapeutics. Dervla's LinkedIn profile. 

Noon is from Thailand, and grew up in an academic family. Her undergraduate major is dentistry, and she came to Harvard Dental School for her PhD. Her thesis work was on Bdf1, a yeast bromodomain protein involved in gene expression. After graduation, she did postdoctoral work at MIT and then joined the faculty at Chulalongkorn University back home in Thailand.

Eun-Jung received her PhD from Seoul National University. She was a member of the Buratowski lab from 1996-2001, where she was the first person to show that the phosphorylated RNA polymerase II C-terminal domain is necessary for recruiting mRNA processing enzymes such as the capping enzyme. She is currently a Professor at Sunkyunkwan University.

Philip is originally from Ukraine, got his undergraduate and masters degrees in medicine from Moscow State University, and his PhD at University of New Hampshire. As a postdoc, he did groundbreaking work on TFIID TAFs, and together with Eun-Jung Cho, showed that changing RNA pol II CTD phosphorylation patterns during elongation recruited different RNA processing factors. After leaving the lab, Philip went to the MIT Sloan School for his MBA, and since then has been working in Boston's biotech sector. Philip's LinkedIn profile.

Toshi Takagi obtained his MD from Kyushu University and his Phd at University of Tokyo.  He did postdoctoral work in the Buratowski lab from 1996 to 2000 with support from the American Cancer Society.  In the process of identifying the first higher eukaryotic capping enzyme gene, he discovered a new class of RNA phosphatases that resembled protein tyrosine phosphatases.  Since leaving the lab, he has been a senior research scientist at Shionogi BioResearch, Merck, and Rosetta.  After many years running the high throughput drug screening at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, Toshi recently moved to Poland to become the Director of High-Throughput Screening at Captor Therapeutics.  Toshi's LinkedIn Profile.

Christine's dissertation work was on mRNA capping enzyme and its interactions with RNA polymerase II. After graduation, she pursued her long-time ambition in science education and currently teaches at both Fairfield University and Sacred Heart University. Christine's LinkedIn profile.

Bertha was a postdoctoral fellow in the Buratowski lab from 1996-1999, supported by a fellowship from Mexico's CONACYT. While here, she worked on the TFIID TAF subunits.  She currently is on the faculty at the Universidad Nactional Autonoma de Mexico. 

Felix was an undergrad working with grad student Christine Moore Rodriguez on capping enzymes.  Following graduation he got his MD and currently is a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic.

Natalie did her PhD at Harvard studying bacterial transcription. Supported by an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship, her postdoc research studied the basal transcription factor TFIIE. She then pursued her passion for teaching science as an Instructor at Wellesley University and then MIT.  As the founder and president of BioBuilder Educational Foundation, she now brings her expertise to help teachers everywhere bring synthetic biology to their students. Natalie's LinkedIn page.

Jessica worked in the lab a research technician in between her Master's Degree at Boston University and her PhD at Cambridge University.  She's been in the UK ever since, and is currently a Professor at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, studying the role of chromatin epigenetics in cancer.

After getting her PhD from Duke University, Lulu Fresco spent a short postdoc period with Don Rio at MIT. When the Rio lab moved to UC Berkeley, Lulu came to the Buratowski lab where she mapped the active site of capping enzyme and showed that capping is important for efficient mRNA splicing. She currently resides in Princeton, NJ with her beautiful family.