J. Brooks Crickard PhD (PI)
Brooks received his bachelors degree in Biochemistry from Purdue University in 2007. Before graduate school he spent time studying the biochemistry of ATP dependent chromatin remodeling complexes at Southern Illinois University. He then did his Phd work on RNA Polymerase II transcription elongation complexes at Penn State University. Following his Phd, he chose to train in the area of single molecule optical fluorescence microscopy in the laboratory of Professor Eric Greene at Columbia University. There he studied mechanisms of homologous recombination. During his time at Columbia, Brooks was the Mark Foundation Fellow of the Damon-Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Brooks’ future goals are to understand how human homologous recombination enzymes function to promote DNA repair.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Bryan Ferlez
Bryan reciev
ed his bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Penn State University in 2008. He then taught high school chemistry as a New York City Teaching Fellow for one year before returning to Penn State as a graduate student to study the light reactions of photosynthesis in bacteria. After receiving his PhD in 2016, he applied synthetic biology approaches to engineer bacterial microcompartments. Bryan is an expert in optical spectroscopy, protein purification, and microbiological techniques. In the laboratory his work will focus on learning single molecule approaches to study large macromolecular assemblies.
Renna Costa
Renna received her bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from the University of Fortaleza in 2015 and her Ph.D. degree in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the State University of Campinas in 2021, both in Brazil, working with drug discovery for glutaminase enzymes. Before this she was a researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular and Developmental Biology (LBMD) focused on cytotoxicology analysis of compounds in breast cancer in 2012. She was also an exchange student in the Science without Borders program in 2013, with a summer internship at the US company Assurex Health, focused on pharmacogenomics. Acted as a volunteer researcher in the multidisciplinary care of patients with Fibromyalgia Syndrome from 2010 to 2011. Renna has experience in Molecular, Cell, Structural, and Cancer Biology, Biochemistry, and Pharmacogenomics.
Graduate Students
Jingyi Hu
Jingyi received her bachelor’s degree from Fudan University in 2020. Then she went to a second-hand bookstore and worked as an auditor of pirated books for three months. After that, she had remote enrollment at Cornell and took a semester’s online courses at home. In the lab, she will focus on the role of hDmc1 in meiosis as well as the function of Rdh54.
Mitch Woodhouse (Co-mentored with Michelle Wang)
David Moraga
David obtained his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at SUNY Binghamton in 2021. Upon graduating he moved to Cornell for his graduate studies. In the Crickard lab he focuses on the interaction between motor proteins and a type 1A topoisomerases in Homologous recombination.
Undergraduates
Jessica Scheer
Jessica is a Senior at Cornell and is majoring in Biological Science with a concentration in Molecular and Cell Biology. She is from Long Island NY, and is interested in discovering more about the molecular function that can be targeted in cancer research.
Lauren Peysakhova
Issa Sommers
Amanda Xu
Audrey Kohlman
Rafael Mendez
Former Crickard Lab members
Jennifer Dau (Currently a Medical Student at UIC)
Undergraduates
Alex Mandadjiev ( Currently interviewing for Med School)
Krishay Sridalla (Currently interviewing for Med School)
Margaret Keymakh (Currently in med school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine)
Gavin Calabretta (Cowen investment banking)
Adam Benmoussa-Summer REU (Currently an Undergraduate at the University of Iowa)