We are delighted to welcome Dr. Helen Hobbs as a new postdoc, and Catalina Dentzel Helmy and Mautasim Hussain as new Jr. Specialists in the lab.

Congratulations to Theresa for receiving an NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 award, which supports her work on genetic systems that record cell histories as well as her contributions to making research environments […]

Congrats Alon and team for giving yeast the ability to continuously hypermutate antibodies! This let us evolve high-affinity antibody fragments, including potent nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2, just by iteratively growing and […]

Congrats to Alex Javanpour for using OrthoRep to evolve a series of high-performance biosensors based on the BenM transcription factor! Alex’s biosensors for muconic acid and adipic acid outperform previously-engineered […]

Congratulations to Theresa for being selected as a 2021 Leading Edge Fellow!

Our essay exploring systems for in vivo hypermutation is out in Current Opinions in Chemical Biology. We discuss the motivation for continuous protein evolution systems, arguing that their uniqueness and […]

Congratulations to Theresa and team on the publication of their paper describing CHYRON (Cell History Recording by Ordered Insertion), a DNA recorder that acts primarily by writing new DNA through […]

We’re excited to welcome Dr. Rosana Molina as a new postdoc, and Alexandra Degan and Alexander (Olek) Pisera as new PhD students in the lab.

Congratulations to Gordon and our collaborators Ella Watkins-Dulaney, Patrick Almhjell, Christina Boville, and Frances Arnold for showing how OrthoRep-driven continuous replicate evolution of an enzyme called TrpB can generate extensive […]

We are honored and excited to receive the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award to support our work on continuous antibody evolution with our collaborators Andrew Kruse and Debora Marks at […]

Congrats to Chang and the lab for being recognized by the 2019-2020 Faculty Excellence in Research Early Career Award from UCI’s Samueli School of Engineering!

We are grateful to receive a 5-year R35 Outstanding Investigator Award from the NIH to support the further development and application of our continuous mutation and evolution systems.

Congrats to Ziwei, Brandon, Arjun, and Garri for their paper on automating continuous evolution! In collaboration with Mo Khalil’s group at Boston University, we combined OrthoRep and eVOLVER to achieve […]

Sumbul Haider joins our lab as a new PhD student. Sumbul is in the Chemistry PhD program and will work on continuous evolution of enzymes. She received her BS in […]

Chang is named one of the 2019 Moore Inventor Fellows!

Chang gave the Robert W. Vaughan Lecture in Chemical Engineering at Caltech, which honors distinguished young scientists in any of the fields of Chemical Engineering, Chemical Physics or Applied Physics.

We’re delighted to welcome Jonathan Clements, Ria Deshpande, and Vincent Hu as new PhD students in our group; and Jake Ho as a new masters student in our group.

Chang was named the 2019 ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator, which “honors the contributions of a young scientist who has made a major impact on synthetic biology and/or related fields”!

Congratulations to Alex for his paper showing that OrthoRep is compatible with many yeast strains and can encode large genetic cargos for rapid evolution! Alex’s paper also resolves early reports […]

Congratulations to Theresa, Joey, Mason, Courtney, Guohao and our collaborators for developing CHYRON, a single-site DNA recorder that autonomously marks lineage and logs signals in human cells. CHYRON uses an […]

Congratulations to Courtney, who won an NSF GRFP, and congratulations to Gordon, who received honorable mention!

Congrats to Ziwei on the publication of his paper in Current Opinion in Systems Biology on how continuous evolution can be used to understand pathways of adaptation.

Congratulations to Ziwei and Arjun on their work engineering the expression systems of OrthoRep. This work, just accepted at ACS Synthetic Biology, shows that new promoters and hard-coded polyA tails […]

Congrats to Courtney for winning the American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship for her project “Developing a novel molecular memory recording system to interrogate the role of hypoxia in cardiogenesis!!”

Congrats to Arjun, Garri, Muaeen, and Alex for their latest work on supercharging evolution, just out in Cell! Our OrthoRep system is now continuously and stably evolving user-selected genes at […]

Congrats to the OrthoRep team for receiving seed funding from UCI’s Applied Innovation to start a company based on OrthoRep technology!

Congrats to Theresa and our collaborators at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine for winning two seed grants to apply Theresa’s new continuously mutating DNA locus that rapidly accumulates random nucleotide […]

Welcome Kianna Nguyen, who starts as a new technician in the lab, working on antibody yeast display with OrthoRep.

Congrats to Garri, Kristin, Arjun, and Alex for their excellent work on engineering two orthogonal DNA replication systems with tunable error rates and proving that they are mutually orthogonal, which will […]

Guohao has been selected to receive an Allergen Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship as well as a fellowship from UCI’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program to support his summer research. Congrats Guohao!

Congratulations to Dr. Xiang Li, who recently defended his thesis, for accepting the position of Scientist I at Encodia! He will be working on an exciting directed evolution effort there. […]

We are delighted that Dr. Alon Wellner will join our group as a postdoctoral fellow starting next month! Alon most recently led projects at biotech startups, where he focused on developing bacteriophage therapies […]

Welcome to Gordon and Courtney, who officially join as new PhD students in the lab! Gordon is working on using OrthoRep to evolve metabolic enzymes that produce commodity chemicals, and […]

Xiang Li successfully defended his PhD thesis today. Congratulations to Xiang on all the hard work and exciting results!

Our project on designing circuits that count biological events and record them as mutations in DNA was awarded an R21 by the NIH. Congrats to Theresa for developing the idea […]

Chang was named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. Fellows are invited to present and network at U.S. and international Kavli Frontiers of Science symposia, designed to […]

Congratulations to Guohao for winning an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Grant in support of his work on engineering a continuous mutational barcoding systems in mammalian cells!

Tate Lone joins our group as a new Junior Specialist! Tate received her B.S. in Biochemistry from CSU Long Beach, where she worked primarily in Judy Brusslan‘s lab studying the role […]

Eamon Jahani and Guohao Liang join our lab! Eamon and Guohao are both undergraduates at UC Irvine and will be working on targeted mutagenesis in yeast and mammalian cell systems.

Rishi Jajoo was just awarded a three-year fellowship from the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research! This highly competitive and prestigious fellowship will support Rishi’s work on mitochondrial genetic […]

Prof. Liu is now a joint faculty member in UCI’s Department of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry. We look forward to more collaborations with MB&B faculty and students.

Garri Arzumanyan officially joins our group as a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering. Garri received his B.S. in Bioengineering from UCSD, where he worked primarily in Bernhard Palsson‘s lab doing enzyme […]

Joey Grotts, who will graduate from Pitzer in May, will join our lab as a Jr. Specialist in June. Joey did great undergraduate research on protein engineering in the context […]

Kelsey Fung, a recent UCI Biomedical Engineering grad, will join our lab as a Jr. Specialist this month. She will be working on projects involving molecular biology and cell culture and will […]

We are delighted to welcome Margaret Mulcare, who will join this month as an administrative assistant to Chang and the lab! Margaret received her BA in Classics from the University […]

Chang is named a Sloan Research Fellow in the field of Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology. Thank you Sloan Foundation for supporting our research!

Rishi’s PhD work on mitochondrial nucleoid segregation, done in Johan Paulsson’s group at Harvard,  just came out in Science! Congrats Rishi!