Norma Neff obtained her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on the mechanism of termination of transcription by bacterial RNA polymerase. As a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT with David Botstein, she acquired expertise in yeast molecular genetics and subsequently demonstrated that homologous recombination could knock out genes and introduce new sequences. She then joined the faculty of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where her lab isolated the first yeast protein to have two distinct enzymatic activities associated with the extein and intein created by a protein self-splicing event. At Stanford University, she established a sequencing program for the Stem Cell Institute and played a central role in the development of novel whole-genome sequencing techniques, single-cell RNA-seq, and genome sequencing, and the application of sequencing to liquid biopsy-based diagnostics. As director of the Genomics Platform at CZ Biohub SF, Neff manages sequencing operations, single-cell RNA-seq, genome sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics, and participates in the development of novel diagnostics.
Ritwicq Arjyal moved to the U.S. from Nepal for his undergraduate education at the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a B.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology. As an undergraduate, he worked under the mentorship of Dennis Grogan to better understand the roles of certain genes in the Archaea, sulfolobus acidocaldarius. After graduation, Ritwicq moved to San Francisco to work in a startup that used microfluidics to automate library preparations for sequencing. He worked to develop, optimize, and troubleshoot assays for library preparation for multiple kinds of sequencing platforms.
Angela Detweiler holds a B.S. in Ecology and Environmental Biology, and a M.S. in Biology. Prior to joining CZ Biohub she spent some years at NASA ARC studying the structural and functional diversity of hypersaline microbial mats. She also collaborated on a spaceflight experiment and payload integration to assess the effects of microgravity and radiation on B. subtilis. Since joining the platform in 2019, she has been involved in Biohub's CLIAhub, CA Covid Tracker and Cell Atlas projects. She also provides sequencing training to local and global health staff, aimed at facilitating pathogen detection and discovery. Angela oversees daily sequencing operations on a variety of platforms and enjoys beta-testing novel sequencing technologies and protocols.
After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Honey joined an Immune-Genomic methods lab led by Professor Christophers Vollmers, where she worked on generating whole transcriptome annotation and analysis of organisms using an in-house method called Rolling Circle Amplification to Concatemeric Consensus (R2C2). Later on, she took part in an ongoing project looking at the effect of long term smoking on the T-cells and B-Cells of the Human Immune Repertoire. In this project, she worked on generating high quality cDNA libraries for Illumina sequencing. As part of the Genomics Platform at CZ Biohub, she works on NGS technology to provide high quality data for both internal and external investigators. Honey's role on the Genomics Platform extends to providing consultation on best practices of sequencing experimental design, troubleshooting the sequencing process, and maintaining good communication with collaborators to ensure projects receive optimal sequencing data.
Amanda Seng received her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and M.Sc. in Molecular Medicine from Charité Medical University of Berlin, Germany. Her thesis research was on cell fate plasticity during early development of the zebrafish embryo using RNA-labeling techniques at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. She also has experience working on direct reprogramming in C. elegans using CRISPR techniques, and molecular phylogenetic on Peperomia and Orobanche. Previously she worked as an application scientist on next-generation sequencing in Malaysia, her home country. At the CZ Biohub Stanford BioCAT she works on single-cell transcriptomics and genomic sequencing for internal and external researchers and Human Microbiome projects.
Andy Zhou received his B.S. in Biochemistry from Miami University of Ohio, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the California Institute of Technology. At Caltech, Andy conducted his thesis research on the search processes conducted by DNA-repair proteins in E. coli. Afterwards, he conducted postdoctoral research in plant synthetic biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and UC Berkeley where he developed sequencing-based assays for characterizing promoter architecture in plant systems. At CZ Biohub, Andy’s role is to help develop spatial transcriptomics approaches for high-dimensional and high-throughput quantitative biology.
