WRF Postdoctoral Fellowship Selection Committee
WRF Postdoctoral Fellows are chosen by an outstanding committee comprising experts in multiple scientific disciplines and assembling strong research teams.

David Galas, Ph.D./Chair
Pacific Northwest Research Institute

David Galas, Ph.D./Chair
Pacific Northwest Research Institute
David Galas earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California (Davis-Livermore) and is a Senior Investigator at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute. He has worked in academia, the biotech industry and in government. He was Director for Biological Research at the Department of Energy, heading the DOE’s Human Genome Project, on leave from the University of Southern California where he was Professor of Molecular Biology and chairman. His training was in physics at the University of California. His broad research interests include molecular biology and human genetics, and the understanding of complex biological systems. He is the recipient of several awards including the Smithsonian Institution-Computer World Pioneer award, and has served on many academic and government boards, most recently the Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Medicine and is a lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bing Brunton, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Bing Brunton, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Jonathan Carlson, Ph.D.
Microsoft

Jonathan Carlson, Ph.D.
Microsoft

Courtney Crane, Ph.D.
Mozart Therapeutics

Courtney Crane, Ph.D.
Mozart Therapeutics

Aimée Dudley, Ph.D.
Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Aimée Dudley, Ph.D.
Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Cyril Engmann, MD
PATH

Cyril Engmann, MD
PATH

Marcos Frank, Ph.D.
Washington State University

Marcos Frank, Ph.D.
Washington State University

Vince Holmberg, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Vince Holmberg, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Grace Huynh, MD, Ph.D.
Microsoft

Grace Huynh, MD, Ph.D.
Microsoft
Grace Huynh is a Principal Researcher in the Microsoft Research Health Futures group, a team responsible for research, incubations, and moonshots to drive cross-company strategy, partnerships and real-world impact across healthcare and the life sciences. Her experience spans lab-based research, computational modeling, and implementation to practice in public health.
Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Huynh received her PhD in Bioengineering from UCSF/UC Berkeley with a focus on nanoparticulate drug and gene delivery, and completed her MD at Stanford. She then led a team at the Institute for Disease Modeling to develop computational models for tuberculosis and TB/HIV disease progression and transmission. These models were used to support policy in China, India and South Africa, and to support the TB delivery strategy at the Gates Foundation. She has also spent time as a research scientist at MIT working on super-resolution microscopy to map the brain. Her current research focuses on machine learning methods in healthcare, digital pathology and infectious diseases

J. Nathan Kutz, Ph.D.
University of Washington

J. Nathan Kutz, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Richard Miles, Ph.D.
Princeton University; Texas A&M University

Richard Miles, Ph.D.
Princeton University; Texas A&M University

Jessica Ray, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Jessica Ray, Ph.D.
University of Washington

Daniel Slichter, Ph.D.
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Daniel Slichter, Ph.D.
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Caleb Stoltzfus, Ph.D.
Alpenglow Biosciences

Caleb Stoltzfus, Ph.D.
Alpenglow Biosciences

Lisa Stubbs, Ph.D.
Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Lisa Stubbs, Ph.D.
Pacific Northwest Research Institute

Kathleen Sullivan
Microsoft

Kathleen Sullivan
Microsoft

Jonathan Ting, Ph.D.
Allen Institute

Jonathan Ting, Ph.D.
Allen Institute
Jonathan T. Ting joined the Allen Institute in 2013 to provide electrophysiology expertise for the Human Cell Types program and to develop functional assays on human ex vivo brain slices. Ting has 15 years of experience in patch clamp electrophysiology encompassing both primary neuron cultures and acute brain slices. In his postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, he studied the neural circuitry basis of psychiatric disorders and developed and characterized several transgenic mouse lines now widely employed for optogenetic control of nervous system function. Ting previously earned a Ph.D. in Neurobiology & Behavior and conducted his thesis research in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences with emphasis in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior from the University of California at Davis.
Research focus: A comprehensive analysis of the architecture and function of the human brain requires a multifaceted strategy for revealing the true complexity and diversity of cell types that reside within. It is the exquisite and complex assembly of these unique cell types into distinct functional circuits that enables us to perform essential tasks such as sensory perception, coordinated movement, cognition, and more. Although much effort has been devoted to anatomical mapping of the human brain using post-mortem tissue in both health and disease, the detailed analysis of functions subserved by individual cells within the living human brain has been more challenging to explore. To achieve this goal, we have established extensive research collaborations with local neurosurgeons in the greater-Seattle area to routinely obtain neurosurgical samples of human cortex for research purposes. The vital human brain tissue is transported to the Allen Institute and sectioned into brain slices for detailed analysis using diverse methodologies including patch clamp electrophysiology, optical imaging, single cell transcriptomic profiling, morphological reconstructions, and array tomography. We hope this effort will culminate in a comprehensive classification of cell types of the human neocortex.

David Van Valen, MD, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology

David Van Valen, MD, Ph.D.
California Institute of Technology
David Van Valen is an Assistant Professor in Biology and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT in 2003. In 2011, he earned a doctorate in applied physics from Caltech, where he applied single-molecule techniques to study the life cycle of bacterial viruses. He earned a medical degree from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in 2013. From 2014 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he worked on using machine learning and genomics to empower a new generation of live-cell imaging experiments.
Dr. Van Valen joined Caltech as a visiting associate in 2017 and became an assistant professor of biology and biological engineering in 2018. His group at Caltech studies how living systems and their respective viruses encode and decode information about their internal state and their environment by combining ideas from cell biology and physics with recent advances in imaging, machine learning, and genomics to make novel measurements.

Sarah Warren, Ph.D.
NanoString

Sarah Warren, Ph.D.
NanoString
Selection Committee Alumni
Sue Biggins, Ph.D.
Carol Burns, Ph.D.
Allan Jones, Ph.D.
Peter Lee, Ph.D.
Jasper Rine, Ph.D.
Julie Theriot, Ph.D.
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Eligible Institutions
Eligible Washington state research institutions for the WRF Postdoctoral Fellowship include those listed below. Please contact us at postdoc@wrfseattle.org to confirm the eligibility of other institutions in the state.