Lab Members


Manoj Hariharan
Staff Scientist
I am a Bioinformatics researcher and I enjoy exploring the complexities of mammalian gene regulation. I joined the Ecker lab in October 2012. Here I’m focused on four major areas:
- 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.
Prior to joining the Ecker lab I was a postdoc at Mike Snyder’s lab at Stanford University (and Yale, since Feb 2009) where my focus was mostly on identifying the combinatorial co-association of transcription factors that regulate gene expression, as part of the ENCODE project, phase 2. I was also involved in identifying the role of non-coding regulatory variants – in personal genomes and population wide studies. I did my Ph.D under the guidance of Prof. Samir Brahmachari at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi. During this time, I analyzed the role of human intronic microRNAs in gene regulation, using computational approaches.
You can read more about my science and some non-science on my website https://sites.google.com/site/mhmanoj/

Robert Henley
Postdoctoral Fellow

Travis Lee
Postdoctoral Fellow

Tatsuya Nobori
Postdoctoral Fellow

Wei Tian
Postdoctoral Fellow

Natanella Illouz-Eliaz
Postdoctoral Fellow

Joseph Swift
Postdoctoral Fellow

Bang-An Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow

Zhuzhu Zhang
Postdoctoral Fellow

Anna Bartlett
Research Assistant

Cesar Barragan
Research Assistant

Rosa Castanon
Research Assistant

Renee Garza
Research Assistant

Stephen Gonzalez
Research Assistant

Joe Nery
Research Assistant

Sriram Sridharan
Bioinformatics Analyst

Peter Berube
Graduate Student

Hanqing Liu
Graduate Student


Ryan O’Neil
Graduate Student

Jingtian Zhou
Graduate Student

Bruce Jow
Lab Tech
Huaming Chen
Bioinformatician