Rama Ranganathan (PI).  Rama grew up in San Diego, and received his undergraduate degree in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley.  He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UC San Diego, working jointly with Charles Zuker, Chuck Stevens, and Roger Tsien, and carried out brief postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School (with Rod MacKinnon) and the Salk Institute (with Joe Noel).  He was at UT Southwestern Medical Center from 1997 – 2017, where he built his laboratory and founded the Green Center for Systems Biology. Since late 2017, he joined the University of Chicago, with joint appointments in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Institute for Molecular Engineering. He is building a new Center for the Physics of Evolving Systems at UChicago. [CV] [Mail]

Mike Socolich (Senior Research Scientist).  Mike grew up in Moraga, California, and received his undergraduate degree in Biology from UC San Diego and a Masters degree in Environmental Health from San Diego State University.  Mike expertise ranges from molecular biology to protein biochemistry to Drosophila genetics.  He has been a member of our laboratory since 1997, and plays an integral role in many projects.

Yujiao Wu (Graduate Student).  Yujiao grew up in Shanghai, China, received her undergraduate degree at the Shanghai Jiao Tong university, and a Masters degree in Biophysics at Brandeis University, where she worked with Chris Miller.  She joined UT Southwestern Medical Center as a graduate student in Molecular Biophysics and formally transferred to the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program at the University of Chicago in 2017. Yujiao’s work focuses on the development and application of a new experiment called “differential EFX”, in which we apply a known force at one site in a protein and read-out the response throughout the body of the protein using time-resolved X-ray diffraction. This approach has the potential to explore the internal mechanical heterogeneity that may underlie phenomena such as allostery.

Craig DeValk (Graduate Student).  Craig grew up in Wisconsin, and received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin, majoring in Biochemistry. He is a graduate student in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program at the University of Chicago, and is the first from Chicago to join the lab. Craig is going to work on testing the basic hypothesis that the physical design of proteins depends on the dynamics of the selection function during evolution. The approach will involve a combination of forward experimental evolution in two different model systems and theory/simulations.

Diane Schnitkey (Graduate Student). Diane grew up in Illinois and received her undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology and minor in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a graduate student in Biophysical Sciences. Diane is working on mapping genotype to phenotype to fitness in the cyanobacterial circadian clock.

Tyler Kramlich (Graduate Student). Tyler grew up in Holsbybrunn, Sweden, and attended Northwestern University for his undergraduate education, receiving degrees in Chemical Engineering and Music Composition. In 2020, he matriculated at the University of Chicago as a graduate student in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. As a member of the Ranganathan lab, Tyler is harnessing cellular systems of continuous evolution to investigate the physical design of proteins as products of their dynamic, historical selection function. His research seeks to understand the conservation of certain amino acid networks as the consequence of a protein’s need to evolve.

Rathi Kanan (Research Technician).  Rathi grew up in Houston TX, and received her undergraduate degree in Biology (with Honors) at the University of Texas, Austin. She joined the lab in 2017, and will soon move on to graduate studies.  Rathi’s work focuses on understanding the role of thermodynamic stability in controlling the capacity of proteins to be evolvable; that is, to be adaptive to new functional challenges.

Emily Hinds (Graduate Student). Emily grew up in Wisconsin and received her undergraduate degrees in Biochemistry and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin. She joined the lab in 2019 as a graduate student in the Molecular Engineering program at the University of Chicago. Emily’s work focuses on understanding the size, shape, and connectivity of sequence space accessible to evolving protein families. Towards this, she uses a combination of computational modeling along with high-throughput experiment.

Eric Rouviere (Graduate Student). Eric was raised in Delaware and attended the University of Delaware for his undergraduate studies, where he earned a BS in physics. After completing his bachelor’s degree, he enrolled in the Biophysical Sciences program at the University of Chicago. His research interests center on using simple physical models to understand the mechanisms and evolution of protein properties. In his free time, he enjoys running, cooking, and swimming in the lake.

Niksa Praljak (Graduate Student). Niksa, originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, moved to the USA at the age of one. Raised in Cleveland, he completed his undergraduate studies with honors, earning a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Cleveland State University while conducting theoretical biophysics research under Michael Hinczewski at Case Western Reserve University. Currently pursuing his graduate studies in the Biophysical Sciences program at the University of Chicago, Niksa is also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His passion lies in the realm of generative AI algorithms, which he is adeptly crafting and integrating to better understand the design of proteins.

Nitya Vissamsetti (Graduate Student). Nitya grew up in Bangalore, India, and received her undergraduate degrees in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Psychology from Johns Hopkins University. She is a graduate student in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics program at the University of Chicago. Nitya’s work focuses on elucidating the principles that underlie the design of macromolecular protein machines.

Steven Wasserman (Graduate Student). Steven grew up in North Bellmore, NY, and attended Brandeis University for his undergraduate degree where he double majored in Biological Physics and Biochemistry and received a minor in French and Francophile Studies. He is a graduate student in the Biophysical Sciences program at the University of Chicago and is jointly advised with Dr. Mike Rust. Steven’s work focuses on providing a model for the physical mechanism of allostery and studying the conservation of the mechanism across members of a protein family.

Sonia Yuan (Undergraduate Student).  Sonia grew up in Seattle, WA and is currently a third-year student at the University of Chicago majoring in Biochemistry and minoring in computer science. She joined the Ranganathan lab the winter of her second year, and her work is focused on determining the true complexity of proteins by examining the sparsity of a protein’s epistasis terms. Outside the lab, Sonia is the co-president of Genehackers, UChicago’s iGem team. In her free time, she enjoys reading sci-fi/fantasy novels, folding modular origami, and running.