Creators and Guests

Alexis received her B. S. degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in December of 2008. She then joined the lab of Jacqueline Barton at the California Institute of Technology for her doctoral studies. While at Caltech, she worked as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow on the design, synthesis, and study of DNA mismatch-binding metal complexes and received her Ph.D. in 2014. She pursued postdoctoral work as a Ruth Kirschstein NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of David Liu, where she developed base editing, a new approach to genome editing that enables the direct, irreversible chemical conversion of one target DNA base into another in a programmable manner, without requiring double-stranded DNA backbone cleavage. Alexis joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California at San Diego in 2017, where her lab develops and applies new precision genome editing techniques to the functional genomics field. Alexis’s contributions in teaching, mentoring, and research have been recognized through many awards.

Antony received his Ph.D. in Molecular Endocrinology at The University of Manchester in 2006. He then pursued post-doctoral research at the University of Liverpool, developing recombinant Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes for the single cell microscopy of NF-kappaB translocation dynamics, and the impact on gene expression, in both cell lines and transgenic animal models. Antony joined The University of Manchester as Senior Experimental Officer at the Transgenic Unit core facility in 2014, and has been Manager at the rebranded Genome Editing Unit since 2018. His roles include the integration and application of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to assist in the development of custom experimental models, including novel mouse and cultured cell models, as well as teaching and training users in the application of these cutting-edge techniques, and delivering expert consultation.

Bill received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Microbiology and Immunology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In 1992, he was awarded his Ph.D. in Molecular and Medical Genetics from the University of Toronto, where he pioneered gene-trapping technology in mouse embryonic stem cells. In 1997, Bill took up an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. From 2003 to 2016, Bill led the Mouse Developmental Genetics and embryonic stem Cell Mutagenesis teams at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, focusing on the generation of a genome-wide collection of conditional knockouts in mouse. He has over 80 peer review publications and is now based at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut, as the Director of Cellular Engineering. Bill's laboratory is currently exploiting new genome-editing technology to study gene function and model disease in human stem cells.

Founder, Bitesize Bio