Our Team
Senior Staff
Katherine Donovan
Senior Scientist Longwood Center, LC-3118 Email: kdonovan (at) crystal.harvard.edu Katherine graduated with a PhD in protein biochemistry in Prof. Renwick Dobsons lab at the University of Canterbury. Her research focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptive evolution in a key glycolytic enzyme. Katherine joined the Fischer lab in 2016 as a postdoc and has spent the last few years exploring E3 ligase mechanism and ways of hijacking them using targeted protein degradation strategies. |
Radoslaw Nowak
Scientist II Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: nowak (at) crystal.harvard.edu - personal page: http://www.dtc.ox.ac.uk/people/11/nowak/ Radek graduated Engineering Science at University of Oxford and obtained his DPhil in Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science IDC at University of Oxford working on development of inhibitors for oxoglutarate dependent oxygenases at the Structural Genomics Consortium in the group of Prof. Udo Oppermann. |
Ryan Lumpkin
Scientist I Longwood Center, LC-3112 Email: rlumpkin (at) crystal.harvard.edu Ryan Lumpkin graduated with a BS in Chemistry in 2014 from the University of Denver and then received his PhD in Chemistry in 2019 from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied the mechanisms of Ubiquitin and Ubiquitin-like Post-Translational Modifications in the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Komives. |
Postdoctoral Fellows
Sarah Dixon-Clarke
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: sdixon (at) crystal.harvard.edu Sarah obtained her BSc in Biochemistry, from the University of St Andrews. She subsequently undertook a PhD at the University of Oxford, in the Structural Genomics Consortium, in Dr Alex Bullock’s group. Sarah’s PhD looked to gain insights into the structural and regulatory mechanisms of two underexplored CDK family subgroups and investigate new opportunities for cancer drug development. |
Hong Yue
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: hyue (at) crystal.harvard.edu Hong received her PhD in Organic Chemistry at Peking University, where she focused on the discovery of agonist and antagonist small molecules to regulate the Wnt pathway. Hong joined Dr. Marc Vidal's group at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a postdoc where she was investigating the fragment-fragment interaction network for yeast HDAC complex and developed robust systematical and HTS platform for functional genetics studies through the integration of NGS technology. |
Shourya Sonkar Roy Burman
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: ssroyburman (at) crystal.harvard.edu Shourya obtained his bachelor's degree in Bioengineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur followed by a Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. During his Ph.D. in Prof. Jeffrey Gray's group, he developed computational methods to dock flexible proteins and symmetric proteins in the Rosetta modeling suite. |
Jialin Sun
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: jisun (at) crystal.harvard.edu Jialin graduated from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, with a bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences. She subsequently obtained her Ph.D at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB, A*STAR) under the supervision of Professor Wanjin Hong and Nanyang Technological University under the supervision of Professor Yonggui Gao, specializing in structural biology. During her graduate studies, Jialin investigated a novel protein in yeast that regulates polarity establishment and successfully solved the structure to unveil its molecular mechanism. |
Franziska Wachter
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: Franziska_Wachter (at) DFCI.HARVARD.EDU Franziska’s graduate studies in Irmela Jeremia’s laboratory (LMU/Helmholtz Center Munich, Germany) focused on mechanisms of chemoresistance and apoptosis signaling. Her postdoctoral training in Loren Walensky's laboratory at DFCI was dedicated to BCL-2 family protein biology. She identified and characterized BAX activators discovered in a NMR-based fragment screen and studied new inhibitory mechanism of the apoptotic effector protein BAX. She also validated the on-target mechanism of a p53 reactivating stapled peptide drug that is currently in clinical trials. Franziska received an M.D. from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Germany and completed a residency in Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital/Boston Medical Center. She is currently a fellow in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology and Stem Cell Transplant at DFCI/BCH. |
Ken Morita
Postdoc Email: Ken_Morita (at) DFCI.HARVARD.EDU Ken received an M.D., followed by a Ph.D. in Hematology and Oncology at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Ken joined Dr. A Thomas Look’s laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a postdoc in 2017. Ken joined Fischer lab in 2018 to learn a structural aspect of biology. |
Jiazhi Li
Postdoc Email: jili (at) crystal.harvard.edu Jiazhi received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. During her doctoral program, Jiazhi investigated the structural and mechanistic basis of the CRISPR-Cas system. She is currently a research fellow in Hematology/Oncology and Cancer Biology at BCH/DFCI, and focuses on the research of posttranscriptional gene regulation mechanisms. |
Kedar Puvar
Postdoc Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: kpuvar (at) crystal.harvard.edu Kedar graduated from Valparaiso University, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry. He then attended Purdue University for his Ph.D, studying under Professor Chitta Das. His graduate research there focused on characterizing ubiquitin ligases found in pathogenic bacteria, using a combination of structural biology and biochemistry to uncover their modes of action. |
Graduate Students
Hojong Yoon
CB Graduate Student Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: hojong_yoon (at) g.harvard.edu Hojong graduated from Seoul National University (SNU), where he studied on total synthesis of bioactive natural product. After graduating, he worked at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to discover kinase inhibitors targeting cancer. As a graduate student in Chembio program, he joined the Fischerlab in 2017 and wants to gain expertise in protein biochemistry. |
Cyrus Jin
BBS Graduate Student Longwood Center, LC-3302 Email: cyrusjin (at) g.harvard.edu Cyrus graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry. His research at UCLA was conducted under Professor Steven Clarke on regulation of arginine methyltransferases. |
Michelle Ma
MCO Graduate Student Longwood Center, LC-3302 Email: michellema (at) crystal.harvard.edu Michelle graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in Molecular and Cell Biology. Michelle's undergraduate thesis, conducted under the guidance of Professor Jeremy Thorner, was focused on analyzing putative substrates of a protein kinase in yeast that controls plasma membrane lipid homeostasis. |
Technical Staff
Nadia Kirmani
Research Technician Longwood Center, LC-4302 Email: nkirmani (at) crystal.harvard.edu Nadia graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Duke University with a B.S. in Biology, second major in English literature, and minor in chemistry. At Duke, Nadia conducted research in the Chilkoti Lab, which culminated in an honors thesis; her project was focused on genetically engineering zwitterionic peptides for targeted delivery of chemotherapeutics. |
Noah Krupnick
Research Technician Longwood Center, LC-3112 Email: nkrupnick (at) crystal.harvard.edu Noah graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University with a B.S. in Biology. While at Tufts, he conducted research in the Jonathan Garlick Lab, where he studied gene expression in fibroblast cells derived from diabetic foot ulcers. He was also a student intern in Ralda Nehme’s group at the Broad Institute, where he examined neuronal differentiation in hPSCs derived from patients with psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diseases. |
Visiting Members
Anthony Razov
Masters Student Longwood Center, LC-3112 Email: arazov (at) crystal.harvard.edu Anthony graduated with a BSc in Biology at East Carolina University and is a current Master's student at University of Heidelberg. His undergraduate research focused on anterior-posterior axis development in the mouse embryo at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Dr. Takashi Hiiragi's group. During his graduate studies, he joined Dr. Frauke Melchior's group to investigate the ubiqutin E3 ligase SCF(Fbxw5) and its substrates. |