Lab Members


Manoj Hariharan
Staff Scientist
- leading the various collaborative projects focused on embryonic stem cell biology, initiated as part of the Center for Excellence in Stem Cell Genomics (CESCG) funded by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). For more details, please visit Salk CESCG
- building gene regulatory networks [epigenetic and transcription factor mediated regulation] that shape early development in mouse, which is important to understand severe birth defects in humans like orofacial clefts and congenital heart defects, as part of the ENCODE phase 3 project,
- analyzing transcriptomic changes in the brain during development of schizophrenia model of mouse which is relevant to understand long-term effects of neuropsychiatric disorders,
- profiling the small RNA landscape of embryonic stem (ES) cells and their early lineages in order to elucidate their role in cellular differentiation.

Travis Lee
Postdoctoral Fellow

Tatsuya Nobori
Postdoctoral Fellow

Wei Tian
Postdoctoral Fellow

Natanella Illouz-Eliaz
Postdoctoral Fellow

Wubin Ding
Postdoctoral Fellow
Following his doctoral studies, Wubin pursued a two-year postdoctoral training in Dr. Wanding Zhou’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. During this time, he worked on software development, specifically analyzing DNA methylation array and WGBS data. He actively contributed to the development of SeSAMe, an R package designed for DNA methylation array data processing and analysis. Moreover, he developed PyComplexHeatmap, a Python package for generating complex heatmaps.
In May 2023, Wubin joined the Ecker lab to further expand his research in the field of single-cell epigenomics. Within the Ecker lab, his research primarily focuses on single-cell data analysis, software and algorithm development, and machine learning. With his expertise in computational biology and dedication to advancing epigenetic research, Wubin aims to contribute significantly to the understanding of epigenetic mechanisms at the single-cell level.

Joseph Swift
Postdoctoral Fellow

James Walker
Postdoctoral Fellow

Wenliang Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow

Bang-An Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow

Zhuzhu Zhang
Postdoctoral Fellow

Jordan Altshul
Research Assistant
Jordan Altshul received her BS in Neuroscience from UC Santa Cruz in June 2019. She worked in the Ecker Lab from March 2020 until September 2021, and after a brief hiatus, has been back since September 2022. She helps prepare the libraries for the single-cell methylation pipeline.

Anna Bartlett
Research Assistant

Cesar Barragan
Research Assistant

Rosa Castanon
Research Assistant

Renee Garza
Research Assistant

Joe Nery
Research Assistant

Cynthia Valadon
Research Assistant
Cynthia graduated with a BS in molecular, cell, and developmental biology from UC Santa Cruz. She joined the Ecker lab in 2021 as a research assistant to help prepare libraries for the single-cell methylation pipeline.

Peter Berube
Graduate Student

Hanqing Liu
Postdoctoral Fellow

Yue (May) Wu
Graduate Student
May is a graduate student from UCSD biological sciences. She received her B.S. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021. May has been working in the Ecker GAL lab since 2022 and is now studying genetic and epigenetic regulations in diseased human brains.

Qiurui Rachel Zeng
Graduate Student
Qiurui Rachel Zeng is a graduate student in the Biological Science Program at UC San Diego. She received her BA in Biomedical Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2020. She joined the Ecker Lab in May 2022 and is now studying age-related epigenetic patterns in the mouse brain using single cell epigenetic sequencing technologies.

Jingtian Zhou
Postdoctoral Fellow

Bruce Jow
Lab Tech
Huaming Chen
Bioinformatician