Tom Wandless
email: wandless@stanford.edu
phone: (650) 723-4005
fax: (650) 725-4665

Tom Wandless spent his wholesome and relatively uneventful childhood in Kansas City before moving to San Antonio to attend Trinity University with the vague notion that it might be OK to be a physician if one were to have to work at all. It was there that two events ultimately put him on a slightly different path that led him to Stanford.

First, after successfully avoiding chemistry in his freshman year, Tom's sophomore year included a general chemistry course taught by Clark Bricker. Day after day, Dr. Bricker innocently mistook Tom's end-of-lecture enthusiasm for actual interest in the subject matter. This led Dr. Bricker to keep Tom after class one day and suggest that he work on an extracurricular research project. Not wanting to disappoint his instructor and bewildered by the request (work that didn't count for a grade!), Tom agreed. Dr. Bricker tasked Tom with inventing a simple experiment to quantitatively demonstrate the relative lifting powers of hydrogen and helium gases. Tom's insightful, creative, and frankly brilliant solution to this seemingly untractable problem so impressed Dr. Bricker that they published their findings in the reknowned publications, Chem 13 News and The Physics Teacher (alas, neither abstracted by PubMed). Having exhausted his opportunities with Dr. Bricker, Tom began working with another chemistry professor, Dr. Mike Doyle, using metal catalysts to make cyclopropanes. Tom was vaguely interested in synthetic methodology, but totally enraptured by the discovery process that is basic research. By this time he had spent a year in Dr. Doyle's lab and he felt it was time to get serious about the looming medical school thing. More or less by chance, Tom spent several days making clinical rounds with a local physician. These afternoons quickly led to the rather disconcerting epiphany that Tom could not imagine spending his life around sick people. Med school was "out", but he had the good fortune to realize that he loved doing research and he was led to believe that one could actually make a living doing it. Graduate school was the logical avenue to pursue a research career, so he finished his B.S. degree in biochemistry at Trinity and moved on.

Tom ended-up at Harvard, arriving at the same time as Stuart Schreiber who had been lured back to Cambridge from Yale. For some reason, at that time Tom ferverently believed that synthetic chemistry could be a useful tool for learning about biology. As a result, he knew he wanted to learn organic synthesis for his Ph.D. studies, but he shied away from the traditional synthetic labs. Tom joined Schreiber's lab and spent the following four years using synthetic chemistry to learn about how the immunosuppressive drugs FK506 and rapamycin work. These studies were tremendously aided by a longstanding collaboration with Jerry Crabtree's lab at Stanford. In his final year at Harvard, Tom built on these newly revealed biological mechanisms to create a cell-based system for controlling the transcription of a specific gene. His thesis was entitled "Turning Genes On and Off Using FKBP and FK506", and he defended his thesis in early 1993. Tom then spent two years working with Chris Walsh at Harvard Medical School. Tom's work focused on a human tyrosine phosphatase, and these studies allowed Tom to expand his range of skills in a more biological direction, while also allowing him to focus more directly on human health.

Tom moved to the Department of Chemistry at Stanford in 1995 and built a research program at the interface of chemistry and biology. He moved to the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology (f.k.a. Molecular Pharmacology) in 2003 and continues to use chemistry to make new tools for biology and medicine. He and his wife, Karlene Cimprich, have a young son named Eli and a younger daughter named Anika.

Kimberly Bonger

Kim hails from Dutchland, which is apparently different from Denmark or Deutschland. During the course of her PhD work (BTW, the best thesis in the Netherlands as assessed by the Dutch Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences) at Leiden University, she danced the night away synthesizing small molecule dimers to study GPCR funtion in the laboratory of Dr. Overkleeft and van der Marel, which only sound like DJ names. Unlike some biologists masquerading as chemical biologists in Wandless Nation, Kim synthesizes both small and large molecules to develop tools with improved temporal and spatial resolution to study cell function. That is, when she’s not climbing a mountain, winning prestigious fellowships or wrestling bears.


Ling-Chun Chen
email: lingchun@stanford.edu
phone: (650) 725-6859

Ling took her time getting to the Wandless lab. She started in Taiwan, then moved to Indiana for awhile, then to Mike Bishop's lab at USCF for her PhD. She hid-out in the UC system for several years before hearing the siren song of tghe Farm and moving to Stanford in 2005. She runs the Wandless lab with Gallic resolve and Caribbean precision, preferring "El Supremo" to all other nicknames. She is devoted to her family and has a thing for Galapagos tortoises.

Bernie Chu
email: bwchu@stanford.edu
phone: (650) 725-6859

The awesomeness that is Bernie Chu comes to us from So Cal, where he graduated from the hecka cool Cal Tech, majoring in chemistry. To be fully in touch with his geeky, but awesome, roots he has mastered solving the Rubik's cube. Measuring an awesome 6'4", Bernie Chu, who prefers to be called "Beanie", is the Yao Ming of science here in the Wandless lab. Beanie is an ex-chemist, having ditched his awesome chemical roots in favor of "living the dream" in the department of Chemical & Systems Biology. While in lab, Beanie can be found mentoring rotons or dreaming about the awesomeness of his scientific endeavors. Beanie keeps our lab stocked with awesome treats baked by his fiancée Cindy. When venturing out into the real world Beanie is always up for a good game of mah jong. That's just how he rolls.

Johan Guillaume

"HOW MANY HATS DO YOU HAVE!?!?": this is an inevitable inquiry after a few days with Johan, (joe-han not yo-han, Dutchlings!), a heavily-clothed (even at the beach!) dude originally from Haiti. He abandoned his membership in the Pirates of the Caribbean and moved to the States. During his days at NYU, he not only danced crazily in clubs, but he also got excited by DNA nanotechnology with James Canary and Ned Seeman. These experiences pushed him toward biology, landing him in the awesome MD-PhD program at Stanford. He chose the Wandless Nation where the world's most awesome people belong, and here he is involved in a project developing cell fitness assay to study about the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Outside the lab, he enjoys cooking Haitian dishes (take a look at his food blog instead of his research), and of course he specializes in collecting hats. The count is currently around 20, but we'll see how many hats he will have at the end of his Stanford years.

Yusuke Miyazaki
email: miyuten1@stanford.edu
phone: (650) 725-6859

"My name is Yusuke and you can call me Yusuke" Miyazaki is a graduate student from the land of the rising sun. He is super-duper smart, having graduated from the highest-ranked middle school, high school, and university in Japan. It is no surprise then that he decided to join our lab, where all the awesomeness in the world takes place (especially at our food table when he brings back treats from Japan). He spent time in the Nagano lab at Tokyo University working on fluorescent imaging probes. After getting a taste of chemical biology, he decided to pursue his interest by choosing a project involving characterization of a destabilizing domain based on an estrogen receptor. When he is not in lab working, he can be found socializing and networking at numerous parties (many reported sightings) or frantically retracing his steps to find his lost wallet and keys....again!

Rishi Rakhit
email: rrakhit@stanford.edu
phone: (650) 725-6859

Did you know that the average Indian-Canadian walks 2.8 times as fast as Mari? Cold weather breeds fast walkers, forcing native Californians to trot along side Rishi. Rishi came to us from the harsh northern climes of Canada (which he maintains is totally a country). Despite this eccentricity, his presence is tolerated since he’s good-natured aboot being the butt of all our Canada jokes. Provided he’s had his morning coffee(s), he’s happy to tell you about his absurdly long career (both undergraduate and graduate) at the University of Toronto where he worked on protein misfolding diseases with Avi Chakrabartty. He’s applying his skills in the Wandless Nation by using DD technology to examine cellular stress due to protein un/misfolding.

Wandless Lab Alums (times in the lab and their current whereabouts)