Justin grew up in Chittenango, NY -- a small rural farming town in the 'upstate' portion of New York State. He developed an early love for nature and biology during his mostly outdoors childhood, spurring him to earn his bachelor's in biology and genetics from the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in 2007. Justin's undergraduate research work in yeast genetics during his time at Cornell kindled a love for genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

The year following his graduation from Cornell he worked as a post-baccalaureate researcher at the NCI in Bethesda Maryland before pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Justin joined the Department of Pharmacology at UNC, and earned his Ph.D. in yeast cell signaling research with Dr. Henrik Dohlman. During his Ph.D. he developed a scientific appreciation for the work of Dr. Bryan Roth in the same department and chose to pursue his postdoctoral training in the Roth lab in 2014. Justin used the freedom of his post-doctoral training period to develop a method for the directed evolution of proteins in mammalian cells in an effort to acquire control over the cell signaling systems he had labored to understand during his Ph.D. work. The result of that work is the platform Justin has now based his lab on here in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah.

Justin spends most of his time advising his amazing team of researchers and trainees. When he can sneak away to the bench he enjoys tinkering with new technology development ideas. Proof of concept data is the best way to convince someone to take a project and run with it!

B.S., Cornell University
Ph.D., UNC Chapel Hill
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Katie grew up in the Atlanta area and studied production and journalism at the University of Georgia. Following graduation, she spent the summer camping around the west in search of a place to settle and eventually landed amongst the mountains of Utah.

After discovering an interest in biology later in life, she went back to school at the University of Utah for a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology, followed by a masters in Evolutionary Biology from Cornell where she studied the molecular pathways responsible for butterfly wing color patterning. After grad school, she moved back to Utah and worked at the high-throughput sequencing core at the Huntsman Cancer Institute before becoming the English Lab's lab manager.

She loves living in Salt Lake with her husband and their animals (Blueberry the cat and Pop Tart the dog), and when she’s not outside hiking, skiing, or camping she's probably on the couch reading anything fantasy-related.

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Katie is refining the VEGAS platform. She is optimizing the methods we use for quantification, evolution, screening, and hit chasing to enable high-throughput applications of the VEGAS technique to a number of GPCR-focused evolution campaigns.

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Adam has returned to the mountain time zone of his youth to join the English lab following nearly two decades of research training in Philadelphia. He is happy to be back in the thin air and looks forward to exploring the Wasatch Range with his partner Julia. In his spare time, Adam enjoys hang gliding, photographing birds, and lying perfectly still under sleeping animals.

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Adam is developing two broad molecular biology platforms for the advancement of directed evolution applications. The first is a screening platform for identifying small, synthetic transcriptional response elements in human cells. The second is a pipeline for the high-fidelity sequencing of single DNA molecules via Nanopore.

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Yuan-En is evolving G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) using the VEGAS platform to identify novel switch-like domains for signaling identity and activation motifs in these proteins. His is currently focusing his efforts on ADRB2, and expanding these efforts to charactertize both well studied and orphan GPCRs.

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Ping was born and raised in China, she came to Utah for undergraduate studies. Like most of the Biology-majored undergrads, she was pre-med once. Being pre-med was the reason got her into doing research. She did her undergrad researches in an evolutionary genetics lab where she met many passionate scientists and discovered her true interests. She ultimately decided to turn her back on the route of being a physician and become a scientist. She worked as a lab technician in labs studying mitochondrial dysfunction in yeasts and the iron-sulfur pathway in the apicoplast of P. falciparum before becoming a graduate student at the English lab.

Ping loves learning different languages, she speaks three more languages, other than Chinese and English. Other than the typical Utahn stuff (hiking, snowboarding, camping), she also enjoys playing with her adorable cat, Nopi, practicing cello, and lying on the couch like a potato.

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Ping is leveraging the TRUPATH G-protein sensor system to study the pharmacogenomics of GPCRs. She is currently focused on the pharmacogenomics of the mu-opioid receptor, successfully identifying a number of common human missense mutations that alter the molecular pharmacology of this receptor.

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Braden grew up in Provo, Utah and in his childhood, quickly discovered his passion for biology, chemistry, and engineering. Following those passions, he earned his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering with a minor in chemistry from the University of Utah in 2020. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked in a research lab focusing on the hepatitis D virus and its mechanisms of exposure and chronic disease development. Following his graduation, Braden continued his research and decided to pursue a PhD, joining the English lab as a graduate student.

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Braden is developing a high-throughput platform to screen inteins for their splicing efficiencies in mammalian cells. His ultimately goal is to identify inteins that can be used to efficiently fuse peptide sequences to the N-terminal domain of GPCRs for applications in peptide ligand screening using VEGAS.

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Caleb was born in Provo, UT. While he spent most of his early years in Utah Valley, he lived in Moscow, Russia for three years in high school and in Taipei, Taiwan for two years after graduating. He obtained bachelor's degrees in bioinformatics and Chinese at Brigham Young University, and worked for a year in Madison, Wisconsin before coming back west to enroll in his current Master's in biomedical informatics program at the University of Utah. His favorite part of this schooling has been coding projects, and will often learn new coding concepts or languages for fun. In his spare time Caleb enjoys running, rock climbing, and cooking plant-based (WFPB) food.

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Caleb is developing a bioinformatic analysis pipeline to process our single molecule Nanopore datasets. His work is enabling us to identify and generate high-fidelity consensus sequences of single Sindbis virus molecules generated in our VEGAS platform and greatly expand our ability to identify hits from this platform.

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Sam is developing a bioinformatic analysis pipeline to process our transcriptional response element library screen. His work is helping us to define and sor through hundreds of thousands of synthetic construct designs to identify and quickly hit chase TRE motifs with desired properties.

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