John Chorba
Principal Investigator
John is a chemical biologist at UCSF and a practicing cardiologist at the San Francisco General Hospital. He trained under David Liu (Harvard) as an undergraduate, Sean Whelan (Harvard Medical School) as a medical student, and Kevan Shokat (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow. He completed his internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and his cardiology fellowship at UCSF. He now leads a research group focused on applying chemical and biochemical tools to study cardiometabolic disease. He lives across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin with his family. Outside of science, he enjoys hiking among the redwoods, cycling over bridges, good beer, and crochet.
Brian Zou
Junior Specialist
Brian (he/him) is a recent graduate from Macalester College, where he became drawn to answering questions around health from an interdisciplinary molecular lens. He's an aspiring physician-scientist interested in therapeutic development in the framework of the biopsychosocial model of health. Brian just returned to us from a Fulbright year with Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede in Sweden where he investigated metalloprotein biochemistry and protein misfolding as they relate to neurodegeneration. Outside of work, Brian enjoys staying active, cooking, reading, and dabbling in small creative projects.
Lapon (Him) Visitvoranat
Junior Specialist
Him is a recent UC Davis graduate who has traded the heat of Sacramento for the fog of San Francisco. He has a background in genetics and epigenetics, which we plan to leverage to in unraveling the molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular disease, posttranscriptional regulator of the LDL receptor, and the fundamental cell biology we find along the way.
Tianqi Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow
Tianqi is a computational and structural biologist well-versed in drug discovery. She received her PhD from Nankai University (China) and had a brief stint in the biotech world before we lured her to San Francisco, where she is now working on the scope and mechanisms of small molecule mediated ribosome stalling. She maintains her cardiovascular fitness through contemporary dance and jazz!
Kanika Leang
Junior Specialist
Kanika is a recent graduate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s interested in the translational aspect of chemical biology where she can contribute to the development of drugs and therapies. Outside of the lab, she enjoys painting, cooking, and exploring SF!
Pranav Konchadi
Junior Specialist
Pranav is a recent UC Riverside graduate. He is from sunny SoCal and is now getting used to the colder environment of SF and slowly starting to like it. He started his interest in cardiovascular biology at the Zhou Lab at the UCR School of Medicine and is continuing his research in cardiometabolic disorders here at the Chorba Lab. Pranav hopes to use his background in cardiovascular biology to interrogate the cell signaling and dynamics of liver cells to advance our understandings of cholesterol metabolism.
Shaila Sendan
Junior Specialist
Shaila is a recent graduate from University of California, Berkeley where she studied molecular and cellular biology. She is interested in understanding molecular pathways and protein-protein interactions as well as chemical biology broadly. Outside of lab she enjoys hiking, making coffee and keeping aquariums!
Undergrads
Harshit Kolisetty (UC Berkeley)
Branson Bajoua (UC Berkeley)
Elias Klingbeil (UC Berkeley)
Emiko Grun (UC Berkeley)
Sania Moghe (UC Berkeley)
Alumni
We like to think that we played a positive role in their current successes!
|
Alum |
When? |
What? |
Where to? |
| Brandon Kim | 2024 | Undergrad | Undergrad (Macalester) |
| Rue Moe | 2024 | Summer Student Intern | Undergrad (Skyline College) |
| Isha Nadig | 2023-2024 | Undergrad | Undergrad (UCB) |
| Richard Beresis | 2021-2023 | Medicinal Chemist | CVRI (DeGrado Lab) |
|
Finn Reil |
2023 |
Undergrad |
Undergrad (U Hawaii, Hilo) |
|
Isabel Alvarez |
2022-2023 |
Undergrad (UCB) |
Study abroad (Costa Rica) |
|
Colton Sanders |
2023 |
Rotation student |
Grad student (Ostrem lab) |
|
David Byun |
2023 |
Rotation student |
Grad student (Fujimori lab) |
|
Vivian Xia |
2021-2023 |
Post-bac |
Medical school (Case Western) |
|
Nathan Chung |
2022-2023 |
Undergrad (UCB) |
Clinical research coordinator (SFGH) |
|
Caleb Bai |
2022 |
HS student |
High school |
|
Geoff Smith |
2019 |
Postdoc |
Pediatric oncologist (Dana-Farber) / Postdoc (Tyler Jacks lab at MIT) |
|
Adri [Galvan] Durant |
2017-2018 |
Med student |
Urology resident (Mayo Clinic) |
Collaborators
We see further when we stand on the shoulders of giants!
Jonathan Brown
The Brown lab has developed innovative strategies to study and target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a segmental and progressive aging disease that results in premature vascular disease and childhood death. We are working with the Brown lab to complement their gene-editing approaches and develop small molecule inhibitors of farnesylation of Progerin, the mutant form of the lamin A protein responsible for HGPS. We are hopeful that our strategy could lead to a new treatment for HGPS and a chemical tool that could probe new questions in the pathophysiology of aging.
Subbu Venkatraman
Dr. Venkatraman leads engineering at Eko as their Chief Technology Officer. Eko's cloud-integrated digital stethoscope gives us a unique opportunity to design and rigorously test heart-sound based disease algorithms and then bring them directly into the clinic. We have a long-standing relationship with the data science team at Eko, who develop cutting-edge methods in machine learning (faster than the rate of academic publishing!). Our collaborative work could turn the humble stethoscope into a screening tool that rivals more costly imaging studies and even provide new insights into cardiovascular pathophysiology.
Arun Padmanabhan
Dr. Padmanabhan has a longstanding interest in the epigenetic control of cardiac gene expression and has developed a research program exploring the pharmacologic control of acetyl-lysine reader proteins in heart failure. He has spearheaded the in vivo arm of our discovery and validation of CSDE1 as a post-transcriptional regulator of the LDL receptor. His expertise in disease-relevant and mechanistically elegant in vivo models dovetails nicely with our own biochemical focus, portending more collaborative work in the future.
Lucas Zier
Dr. Zier is an interventional cardiologist at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General particularly interested in developing evidence-based decision support tools to improve the care of our most vulnerable patients (and has had success doing so!). We are working together to develop noninvasive methods, through both auscultatory and EMR-based data, to better identify and treat patients with cardiovascular disease.