Knight Initiative Funded Researchers

Heilshorn's interests include biomaterials in regenerative medicine, engineered proteins with novel assembly properties, microfluidics and photolithography of proteins, and synthesis of materials to influence stem cell differentiation. Current projects include tissue engineering for spinal cord and blood vessel regeneration, designing injectable materials for use in stem cell therapies, and the design of microfluidic devices to study the directed migration of cells (i.e., chemotaxis).

William Greenleaf is a Professor in the Genetics Department at Stanford University School of Medicine, with a courtesy appointment in the Applied Physics Department. He is a member of Bio-X, the Biophysics Program, the Biomedical Informatics Program, and the Cancer Center. He received an A.B. in physics from Harvard University in 2002, and received a Gates Fellowship to study computer science for one year in Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. He returned to Stanford to carry out his Ph.D.

Dr. Goldstein-Piekarski directs the Computational Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Sleep Laboratory (CoPsyN Sleep Lab) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and PI within the Sierra-Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC) at the Palo Alto VA. She received her PhD in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley where she studied the consequences of sleep on emotional brain function.

Born in France, Dr. Gaudilliere studied Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique before completing an MD-PhD degree from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University (Dr. Garry Nolan laboratory). Research in the Gaudilliere lab combines high parameter mass cytometry (suspension and imaging mass cytometry) with other proteomics approaches to study how the human immune system responds and adapts to physiological or pathological stressors.

As a graduate student and short-term postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto I studied genetic networks that regulate cell viability in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) and in the single-celled eukaryotes S. cerevisiae and S. pombe, respectively. As a postdoctoral fellow, I demonstrated that the small molecule erastin inhibits the membrane cystine/glutamate transporter system xc-, depletes the cell of glutathione and activates a novel iron-dependent, oxidative cell death pathway termed ferroptosis.