Executive Committee – 2025-2026
The Executive Committee consists of eight U-M faculty representing different departments across three colleges and school. The committee supports the implementation of the mission of the Center for RNA Biomedicine.
Associate Professor
Biological Chemistry and
Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics
Medical School
lydsf@umich.edu
Lydia Freddolino, Ph.D.
The regulatory networks of bacteria play a key role in their information processing capabilities, coordinating and executing interactions with their environments. Quantitative, predictive models of these networks would be tremendously beneficial for facilitating the development of new antimicrobial therapies, enabling synthetic biology applications, and understanding bacterial evolution and ecology. Ultimately, the aim of my laboratory is to build a multiscale framework enabling modeling of bacterial regulatory networks at any level of detail, from atomistic to cellular. To this end, we develop and apply high-throughput experimental methods for measuring biomolecular interactions and cellular regulatory states in vivo, and for profiling the phenotypic consequences of regulatory changes. In tandem with these experimental approaches, we use molecular simulation and mathematical modeling to obtain high-resolution insight into the biomolecular interactions driving regulatory networks, and the systems-level effects of altering them.
More information and publication list are available on the Freddolino lab website.
Associate Professor of Human Genetics
kalantry@umich.edu
Sundeep Kalantry, Ph.D.
The focus of Kalantry laboratory is to understand how X-chromosome inactivation occurs. X-inactivation equalizes X-linked gene expression between male and female mammals by transcriptionally inactivating one of the two X-chromosomes in females. X-inactivation is required for the viability of female cells and is a paradigm of epigenetic inheritance, given that within a shared nucleoplasm one X-chromosome of an identical pair becomes inactivated while the other remains active and that replicated copies of the inactive and active X-chromosomes faithfully maintain their transcriptional states across many cell division cycles. X-inactivation is controlled by long non-coding RNAs and chromatin/transcription regulators, both of which are a focus of our lab.
Sarah Kargbo-Hill, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
skarhill@umich.edu
Sarah Kargbo-Hill, Ph.D.
Bio to come
Rachel Niederer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry, Medical School • MM Biological Chemistry Dept., Faculty Scholar, Center for RNA Biomedicine
rachnied@umich.edu
Rachel Niederer, Ph.D.
Bio to come
John Prensner, M.D., Ph.D.
Barry J Glick Early Career Professor of Pediatric Oncology, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry, Medical School
prensner@umich.edu
John Prensner, M.D., Ph.D.
Bio to come
Research Assistant Professor, Life Sciences Institute and Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry, Medical School, Faculty Scholar, Center for RNA Biomedicine
jquerido@umich.edu
Jay Brito Querido, Ph.D.
Bio to come
Chase Weidmann, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry, Medical School, Faculty Scholar, Center for RNA Biomedicine
jcweidman@umich.edu
Chase Weidmann, Ph.D.
Bio to come
Assistant Professor
Biological Chemistry
yzhangbc@umich.edu
Yan Zhang, Ph.D.
CRISPR-Cas is a RNA-guided, genetic interference pathway in prokaryotes that enables acquired immunity against invasive nucleic acids. Nowadays, CRISPRs also provide formidable tools for facile, programmable genome engineering in eukaryotes. Cas9 proteins are the “effector” endonucleases for CRISPR interference; and have recently begun to be also recognized as important players in other aspects of bacterial physiology (e.g., acquisition of new spacers into CRISPRs, endogenous gene regulation, microbial pathogenesis). The Yan Zhang laboratory is broadly interested in CRISPR biology and mechanism. We use Neisseria species as our model system, and E. coli and human cells as additional platforms. We employ complementary biochemical, microbiological, genetic and genomic approaches. We are also interested in working with the broader scientific community to develop and apply novel CRISPR-based tools to tackle diverse biological questions.