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To Leverage Scientific Innovation and Discovery to Cure Children’s Heart Disease
Learn more about the impact of philanthropy on the innovative and life-changing projects of BASE and on other programs in the Heart Center.
Latest News
July 2025
Dr. Jesse Engreitz was awarded a Single Ventricle Research Fund award from the Additional Ventures Foundation for his project entitled “Regulatory Map of the Human Fetal Heart to Understand the Etiology of Single Ventricle Defects”. He will be collaborating with Drs. William Goodyer, Casey Gifford, and Xiaojie Qiu to build a foundational map of enhancer-gene regulation during heart development and disease in order to better understand the genetic causes of single ventricle disease. Read more about the program here.
June 2025
BASE welcomes their new Research Project Manager, Nicole Navarro! A Bay Area native and Boston College alumnus, Nicole began her career as a health technologies research engineer at Apple. She then earned her Chemical Biology PhD from UC Berkeley, where she developed carbon nanotube-based nanosensors for brain imaging and viral detection applications in Dr. Markita Landry’s lab. After graduate school, she returned to industry research at Thermo Fisher Scientific where she developed bespoke surface chemistries to improve high-throughput genomic sequencing platforms. Nicole currently lives by Ocean Beach with her partner, Alex, and Karl, the San Francisco fog. Nicole loves hiking, camping, roller skating poorly, and reading horror novels.
New publication out in Science from Dr. Mark Skylar-Scott and collaborators entitled “Rapid model-guided design of organ-scale synthetic vasculature for biomanufacturing”. They developed complex new computational and bioprinting tools to design and 3D print the complex vascular networks found throughout the body. Read more about their study in the Stanford Report article here.
Celebrating another PhD graduate, Dr. Michael Montgomery, an Engreitz Lab PhD student in the Genetics Graduate Program, who successfully defended his thesis titled “Rewriting Regulatory DNA to Dissect and Reprogram Gene Expression” on June 13, 2025!
May 2025
Congratulations to our newest PhD graduate, Dr. Jonathan Weiss, Skylar-Scott Lab PhD student in the Bioengineering Graduate Program, who successfully defended his thesis titled “Low-Cost, Open-Source, and High-Throughput 3D Printing: A Multi-Cellular Spheroid Approach” on May 30, 2025!
Two BASE PhD students were awarded the Bio-X Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship! Congratulations to Lucy Zhang in the Gifford Lab, who was selected for her work on “Linking Inflammation and Congenital Heart Disease using a Cardioimmune Organoid System”, and to Yi Yi Du in the Skylar-Scott Lab, for his project “Organ-scale Multicellular Continuous Bioprinting”.
March 2025
Dr. Mauro Lago Docampo, postdoc in the Rabinovitch Lab, presented on Loss of TBX4 Alters Smooth Muscle Contractility and Induces Endothelial Dysfunction in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension at the TBX4-Life Scientific conference in San Francisco. This event brings together scientists and clinicians interested in TBX4 related pathways and diseases.
BASE Spotlight: Michael Montgomery, PhD Student from the Engreitz Lab
What is your role?
I am a 4th year PhD Candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Engreitz lab.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I really enjoy working as part of dynamic teams in highly collaborative, multi-lab projects. I have made more friends, learned more things, and done more impactful work thanks to the collaborative nature of BASE and the Department of Genetics. I was a student-athlete in college and am a firm believer that a strong, dedicated team with a common goal will always be successful.
Where were you before you came to Stanford?
I obtained a B.S. in Microbiology from California State University, Long Beach and spent three years as a researcher in the Seibold lab at National Jewish Health in Denver, CO. My work in the Seibold Lab included investigating the effects of air pollution on the asthmatic lung and deploying gene-editing methods to identify genes underlying differentiation of lung cell types.
Share a bit about one of your research projects/experiences (past or current):
I develop and apply high-throughput technologies to study the regulatory DNA sequences that control cell type-specific gene expression. I use these technologies, in combination with sequence-based predictive models of gene regulation, to systematically dissect and reprogram gene expression. I often employ constructionist approaches in my work, such as by using complex, rationally designed sequence edits to engineer synthetic regulatory syntax into endogenous DNA. Through this work, we have learned a lot of interesting things about the context-specificity, programmability and responsiveness of regulatory DNA.
Who is a scientist that inspires you, and why?
My sister, Dr. Sarah Montgomery! She is the first person in my family to pursue a career in science (Neuroscience) and I was so inspired by her that I followed in her footsteps. She is brilliant, ambitious, and has always been a huge source of support and advice throughout my career.
What are your favorite activities outside of work?
Backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, spending time at the dog park, skateboarding and karaoke!
What do you hope to be doing 10 years from now?
I hope to have founded a biotechnology company that uses our CRISPR-based technologies as platforms to engineer new gene therapy approaches that quantitatively tune cell type-specific gene expression. Through this, I hope to find cures for rare genetic diseases that are not amenable to currently available gene therapies, such as those caused by haploinsufficiency.