Samantha Morris, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Samantha Morris, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Developmental Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Allen Distinguished Investigator, and New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator. Dr. Morris trained as a Developmental Biologist at the University of Cambridge. In Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz’s group, she investigated mechanisms of cell fate decision-making in the earliest stages of development. She then joined the laboratory of George Daley at Harvard Medical School, where she focused on the analysis of gene regulatory networks to dissect and engineer cell identity. In 2015, she established her independent research group. In 2017, Dr. Morris was named a Vallee Foundation Scholar. In 2019, she was awarded the St. Louis Academy of Science Innovation Award and was named an Allen Distinguished Investigator. In 2020, she was named a Sloan Fellow, and a New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Society for Developmental Biology, serves on the editorial boards of Development, Cell Systems, and Developmental Cell, and is an Associate Editor at Development.

Guillermo Rivera-Gonzalez, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Guillermo is originally from Mexico and earned his undergraduate degree from the Mexican National Autonomous University. He received his PhD from the University of York, UK and underwent initial training as a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. In the Morris lab, Guillermo will be studying the role of different factors during the process of cell reprogramming. He will also use single-cell sequencing as a tool to understand adult stem cell heterogeneity and its biological implications.

Kenji Kamimoto, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Kenji Kamimoto earned his Ph.D. from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Bioscience, University of Tokyo, Japan. During his Ph.D., he worked in the lab of Dr. Atsushi Miyajima. In the Atsushi Lab, he studied the mechanism of mouse liver proliferation using both computational analysis and molecular biology techniques. In the Morris Lab, he will utilize computational modeling and machine learning methods to dissect the dynamics of cell reprogramming.

Tayyab Adil

Postdoctoral Fellow

Tayyab received his bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in 2014. During his undergrad, Tayyab spent a summer studying the role of TET3 in development and pluripotency in the Rudolf Jaenisch lab at the Whitehead Institute. For his PhD, Tayyab joined the Jon Henry lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he studied stem cells in the frog cornea, and their ability to heal/regenerate, and generate additional cell fates, such as lens cells, in an effort to develop novel therapeutic approaches for diseases/injuries. In the Morris lab, Tayyab’s work will involve dissecting the mechanisms of cellular reprogramming with an aim to advance therapeutically beneficial cell types.

Emily Holloway

Postdoctoral Fellow

Emily received her bachelor’s degree in Biology from Kalamazoo College. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Michigan under the mentorship of Dr. Jason Spence. In the Spence lab, Emily characterized the cellular heterogeneity of the developing human intestinal stem cell niche and corresponding human intestinal organoid models. She applied insights from primary tissue to develop modified culture conditions that improved organoid complexity. In the Morris lab, Emily hopes to use intestinal organoids and in house computational tools to study molecular drivers of small intestinal epithelial regional adaptation.

Emily Butka

DBBS Graduate Student, Computational and Systems Biology Program

Emily received her degree in Biology and Mathematics from St. Olaf College in 2018. At St. Olaf, she worked with Professor Steve Freedberg to model sex biases in organisms with environmental sex determination. In the Morris lab, Emily will focus on the development of new computational tools that better integrate experimental lineage tracing to reconstruct reprogramming trajectories from single-cell data.

Sadie VanHorn

DBBS Graduate Student, Developmental, Regenerative & Stem Cell Biology Program

Sadie VanHorn received her degree in Molecular Biology from Ohio Northern University in 2018. In Dr. Jamie Sider’s laboratory at Ohio Northern, Sadie studied the role of CASK protein in polar cell migration during Drosophila melanogaster oogenesis. Her first experience at WashU was in the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Haswell, studying MSL expression and localization in Arabidopsis thaliana while participating in the AMGEN Scholars Program. Currently, she is in the Developmental, Regenerative and Stem Cell Biology program. In the Morris lab, Sadie will be developing methods to track cellular history in reprogramming models and intestinal organoids to probe the relationships between stem cell, progenitor, and terminally differentiated cell populations.

Kunal Jindal

DBBS Graduate Student, Molecular Genetics and Genomics Program

Kunal Jindal received his degree in Biology and Electronics engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, India in 2017. During his undergrad, he spent a year in Dr. George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School on developing in situ sequencing technologies. Later he worked as a research assistant in Dr. Manfred Claassen’s lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland on developing computational tools to analyze time-course RNA seq data. He is currently enrolled in the Molecular Genetics and Genomics program at Washington University.

Xue (Snow) Yang

DBBS Graduate Student, Developmental, Regenerative & Stem Cell Biology Program

Xue (Snow) Yang received her degree in biological science from East China Normal University in 2018. During her years as an undergraduate, she worked in the lab of Dr. Yuan Wang, studying the interaction of transcription factors and microRNAs during hematopoiesis. In the Morris lab, Snow will be studying the role of transcription factor binding during lineage reprogramming. She is a member of the Developmental, Regenerative and Stem Cell Biology Program.

Christy Hoffmann

DBBS Graduate Student, Human and Statistical Genetics Program

Christy received her degree from the University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2016. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied the diverse transcriptional profiles of skeletal muscle in the lab of Dr. Michael Hughes. In the Morris Lab, she will use gene regulatory networks, machine learning, and live cell imaging to elucidate mechanisms driving cell fate during reprogramming. She is a member of the Human and Statistical Genetics program.

Travis Law

DBBS Graduate Student, Computational and Systems Biology Program

Travis Law received his degree in Biology from Grinnell College in 2015. Following his undergraduate studies, he worked as a research associate in Dr. Aviv Regev’s lab at the Broad Institute. During this time, he focused on developing experimental and computational genomics methods to better understand epigenetic and translational regulation and their role in human disease. In particular, this work focused on scaling up single cell ATAC-seq data collection and multiplexing it with other modalities of omics-information, and additionally developing a computational framework for processing ribosomal profiling data and integrating it with genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic information. He is currently enrolled in the Computational & Systems Biology program at Washington University.

Douglas Abrams

DBBS Graduate Student, Computational and Systems Biology Program

Douglas received his degree in history and computational/systems biology from Colby College in 2019. Upon graduating, he worked as a bioinformatician in Dr. Sohrab Shah’s lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering to develop pipelines to analyze scDNA-seq data. Currently, Douglas is a member of the Computational and Systems Biology program.. He is currently enrolled in the Computational & Systems Biology program at Washington University.

Naoto Yamaguchi

DBBS Graduate Student, Molecular Genetics and Genomics Program

Naoto received his bachelor’s degree in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2021. During his undergrad, he developed an imputation method for scATAC-seq data. He also worked on a project developing a Gene Regulatory Network inference method from time-series scRNA-seq data. His interest lies in cellular identity, direct reprogramming, and lineage tracing technology.

Carolynn Gonzalez

Research Technician II

Carolynn is an undergraduate student at Saint Louis University pursuing a B.S. in Biology as well as a minor in Spanish. She works closely with Guillermo, focusing on the development and validation of a cell transplantation assay into murine skin.

We are hiring!

Ph.D. Students

We will welcome inquiries for rotation projects from any Washington University Ph.D. students enrolled in any of our 12 Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. programs.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Please e-mail your CV, including bibliography, to: s.morris{at}wustl.edu

Research Technicians

Please e-mail your CV to: s.morris{at}wustl.edu

Undergraduate Students

We welcome inquiries for research and training opportunities during the academic year and summer.