Three New Faculty Members Join the Beckman Center

Lauren Goins, Ph.D., joined the Department of Developmental Biology as an assistant professor in January.

Dr. Goins did her undergraduate work at Harvard, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in biochemical sciences. She then earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, San Francisco, working with R. Dyche Mullins, Ph.D. 

Dr. Goins’ graduate work focused on the study of molecular mechanisms that control cell motility and the actin cytoskeleton. She identified novel isoforms of the actin-binding protein tropomyosin and characterized their differential roles in cortical integrity, cell shape, cell mobility, cell cycle progression, mitosis, and genomic stability.

Dr. Goins went on to do postdoctoral work with Utpal Banerjee, Ph.D., at UCLA. There she made important discoveries related to developmental hematopoiesis by developing a powerful live-imaging approach that enabled her to visualize and track blood cell development in intact living animals with cellular, and even subcellular, resolution. Combined with single-cell RNA sequencing, she identified multiple layers of cell fate decision points, each leading to distinct differentiated endpoints and novel cell types that serve as platforms for exerting lineage choice decisions that play key roles in signaling to produce distinct cell types. Ultimately, Dr. Goins discovered signaling pathways that, when combined, help maintain a pool of blood progenitors primed and ready to respond to immune challenges. For these accomplishments, she was given the Molecular Biology Institute’s Boyer/Parvin Postdoctoral Award, and was named an Intersections Science Fellow and a Discovery Sciences Emerging Scholar.

At Stanford, Dr. Goins’ laboratory will study how multipotent stem cell lineages can maintain a balance among cell fates and an ability to respond to physiological challenges imposed by environmental stressors such as infection and disease. Using Drosophila as a model organism, she aims to understand how extrinsic signals from the microenvironment impact cell cycle and asymmetric cell division to influence the balance between self-renewal and multilineage blood cell development. This will not only impact the field of developmental hematopoiesis, but will also inform how and why aberrant cell division modes are often associated with stem cell aging and blood disorders.

Ruth Huttenhain, Ph.D., will join the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology as an assistant professor in April 2023.

Dr. Huttenhain obtained her Ph.D. in systems biology from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where she worked with Ruedi Aebersold, Ph.D., to develop a novel targeted proteomics strategy for sensitive and reproducible quantification of proteins across large sample cohorts.

With support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Human Frontier Science Program, Dr. Huttenhain performed her postdoctoral work with Nevan Krogan, Ph.D., at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). During her postdoc, Dr. Huttenhain studied protein network dynamics in the context of HIV infection, which led to the discovery of ARIH2 as a novel HIV-dependency factor. She also pioneered the first proteomics approach that can resolve protein interaction networks simultaneously with temporal and spatial resolution. Applying this approach to study dynamics of protein networks engaged by ligand-activated GPCRs led to the discovery of a previously unrecognized ubiquitin network regulating opioid receptor function.

After her postdoc, Dr. Huttenhain continued at UCSF as an assistant adjunct professor, with a research focus on how GPCRs decode extracellular cues into dynamic and context-specific cellular signaling networks to elicit diverse physiologic responses, a research direction that she will further explore in her laboratory at Stanford. She will exploit quantitative proteomics to capture the spatiotemporal organization of GPCR-signaling networks combined with functional genomics to study their impact on physiology.

Tino Pleiner, Ph.D., will join the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology in June 2023.

Dr. Pleiner obtained his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Göttingen in Germany, working with Dirk Görlich, Ph.D., at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. He did his postdoctoral work with Rebecca Voorhees, Ph.D., at Caltech.

As a graduate student, Dr. Pleiner established an on-site alpaca farm and developed techniques to engineer alpaca-derived nanobodies as precision tools for structural and cellular biology. One example of this work was the development of anti-lgG secondary nanobodies that replace conventional animal-derived secondary antibodies. This work was awarded the Animal Welfare Research Prize by the German government.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Pleiner developed the first structure of the ER membrane protein complex (EMC), which is crucial for the biogenesis of a vast set of different membrane proteins. He also used the EMC as a model system to understand the regulation of membrane protein complex assembly, and in the process, made the discovery of a surprising regulatory role for the kinase WNK1, which moonlights as an EMC assembly factor.

At Stanford, the Pleiner laboratory will combine mechanistic cell biology, biochemistry, and protein engineering to dissect the pathways and molecular machines that mature human membrane proteins to a fully functional state. Dr. Pleiner will also develop alpaca-derived nanobodies as synthetic biology tools to modulate intracellular pathways that globally regulate protein homeostasis in health and disease.

For more information (media inquiries only), contact:
Naomi Love
(650) 723-8423
naomi.love@stanford.edu