Current Members

Mark A. Kay

Mark did an MD PhD at Case Western Reserve University and moved to Baylor College of Medicine in 1987 to pursue a residency and fellowship in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Inborn Errors of Metabolism. He started his work on Gene therapy during this period as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1993 he started his independent career at the University of Washington before moving to Stanford in 1998.  His work encompasses many different fields including gene transfer vectors, genome engineering and non-coding RNA biology. His work spans basic research thru clinical trials. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his partner, adult children, photography, music and playing tennis.

Francesco Puzzo

Francesco is a post-doctoral researcher in the Kay lab interested gene therapy. He earned a PhD at Genethon (France) working on gene therapies approaches for Pompe disease. In the Kay lab, he is developing novel AAV vectors by chemical modification of the capsid.  He is also interested oin characterizing the mechanism behind the nuclease-free AAV-targeted integration. In his free time,  Francesco loves watching sports and playing soccer on campus, listening to music, and playing his guitar.

Yuqing Jing

Yuqing is from China and received her PhD from Peking University.  Her research is focused on studying the mechanisms of functional tsRNA (tRNA derived small RNA) in tumor generation and progression. She also enjoys reading, cooking and hiking.

Hagoon Jang

Hagoon received his PhD from Seoul National University in 2016 and started in the Kay lab in 2017. His research is focused on the functional role of primary transcripts of miR122 as an independent lncRNA in the liver using AAV-Crispr, AAV-Crispri and AAV-CrisprA for in vivo studies.

Feijie Zhang

Feijie is a Life Science Research professional. She assists various researchers in the lab with their projects, especially in performing rodent experiments and procedures.

Stephen Trisno

Stephen is from the Bay Area and completed his B.S. in Bioengineering in 2012 at the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to pursue a dual-degree program at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. There, he completed his PhD in Molecular and Developmental Biology in 2018, where he developed a method to generate human esophageal organoids from pluripotent stem cells to study early developmental process guiding esophageal versus respiratory development. He subsequently completed his MD in 2020 and is currently training at the Pediatric Residency Program at Stanford Health / Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and joined the Kay lab.