Bi-weekly: Thursdays, 12 pm EDT/EST, 9 am PT/PST, 5 pm BST/BDT, 6 pm CEST/CET
https://dfci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m7JJaw52T8yZYt8-ykL6UQ
Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.
Upcoming Speakers
November 5th, 2026
Host: Sean
Probing the Cell Surface Neighborhoods in Cancer
Jim Wells
UCSF
Jim Wells received his BA degrees in biochemistry and psychology from University of California, Berkeley, PhD in biochemistry from Washington State University from Ralph Yount, and Post-doc at Stanford University School of Medicine with George Stark. He began his independent research career in 1982 as a co-founding member of the Protein Engineering Department at Genentech where his group pioneered “gain-of-function engineering” of enzymes, hormones and antibodies. Several biologic products derived directly from these efforts, including engineered proteases, a therapeutic hGH antagonist, and VEGF blocking antibody for cancer.
In 1998, Dr Wells then co-founded Sunesis Pharmaceuticals where he was CSO, and president. At Sunesis, the group developed a novel technology, Tethering, for targeted small molecule drug discovery. The efforts of that group produced a drug for dry eye disease and new RAF inhibitor for cancer and several other compounds for clinical development in cancer.
In 2005, Wells joined the faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF. He founded the Small Molecule Discovery Center and served as Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The Wells Lab now investigates how cell surface proteomes change in health and disease by applying mass spectrometry and protein and antibody engineering, to understand and disrupt human-disease-associated signaling processes. He has co-founded half a dozen other companies, most recently EpiBiologics focused on developing extracellular degraders to remove disease causing proteins.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
November 19th, 2026
Host: Hubert / Sean
Elijah Mena
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Elijah received a B.S. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. During his doctoral training in the laboratory of Michael Rape, he defined a protein quality control pathway by which cells monitor the integrity of a conserved protein dimerization domain. As a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Stephen Elledge at Harvard Medical School, Elijah applied genetic screening approaches to uncover mechanisms of protein degradation, including a key ubiquitin-independent pathway that had remained poorly understood for decades. In December 2025, Elijah joined the faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Assistant Professor and Endowed Scholar in Medical Science. He is the recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and a Recruitment Award from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).
Will Rosencrans
NIH
STING is suppressed by an ATG9A-ATG13-ATG101-dependent Golgi to Lysosome
William Rosencrans is a biochemist and cell biologist whose research focuses on cellular quality-control pathways that protect organelle function and regulate innate immunity. He received his B.A. in Physics, from Colgate University, and completed his doctoral training in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Caltech working under Dr. David Chan, Dr. Tsui-Fen Chou and Dr. Richard Youle at NIH. Now a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Richard Youle within the Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementia. His work has spanned mitochondrial quality control, autophagy, and innate immune signaling, with an emphasis on uncovering mechanistic principles that can be translated into therapeutic strategies.
December 3rd, 2026
Host: Sean / Mikolaj
Angel Ni
Harvard University
Angel Ni received her bachelor's degree in Chemistry from UCLA with a minor in Biomedical Research. She worked in the Rachelle Crosbie lab, where she researched the interactions between cardiac fibroblasts and the extracellular matrix that affect adhesion, activation, proliferation, and remodeling in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In the Christina Woo lab, she integrates proteomics, genetic screens, and biochemical methods to study the CRBN-ligandable proteome.
Simon Shen
Harvard University
Mapping the degron-degrader interaction landscape by scalable combinatorial screening
Simon recently completed his PhD advised by Prof. Brian Liau, in the Harvard Chemical Biology program, and supported by an NIH F31 fellowship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in Chemistry and Physics with a secondary in Computer Science. He is broadly interested in inventing new functional genomics technologies along with tailored computational frameworks that together are powered to reveal new insights into molecular interactions in biology.