Fred Chang fc99@columbia.edu
Read Fred's ASCB Profile
Fred grew up in Palo Alto, California. After attending Princeton University as an undergraduate, he spent many years in San Francisco at UCSF, where he obtained a MD PhD. For his doctorate work, he studied how a negative growth factor regulates the cell cycle in budding yeast with Ira Herskowitz. He identified a gene FAR1 and found that the Far1 gene product inhibits G1 cyclins to cause cell cycle arrest. For a postdoc, Fred then went to Paul Nurse's lab in Oxford and London, where he began genetic studies on cytokinesis in fission yeast. He also went to David Drubin's lab at UC Berkeley where he continued these fission yeast work and learned more about actin. Since 1997, he has been a professor of Microbiology at Columbia University.

Current Lab Members:

Hanspeter Niederstrasser PostDoc
Hanspeter studies the organization of microtubule organizing centers (MTOCs), specifically their assembly and regulation. He focuses on understanding the physical interactions between the components and regulators of the MTOC, particularly at the eMTOC formed after mitosis.

Nicolas Minc PostDoc
Nicolas studies the effects of external electric fields and mechanical constraints on yeast cell polarity.

Mark Ellis PostDoc
Mark studies the organization of lipid microdomains in the medial plasma membrane during cell division. The bulk of his work is focused on the role of cytokinetic ring components and associated proteins in membrane organization.

Nika Erjavec PostDoc
Nika studies how cell polarity affects the inheritance and distribution of damaged proteins during growth and ageing. The project is focused, in particular, towards understanding how damaged, aggregated proteins may interact with components of the microtubule and actin cytoskeleton.

Hwajin Kim PostDoc

Ann Yonetani Graduate Student
Ann studies the formin cdc12 in order to understand the mechanisms of actin ring assembly and contraction.

Neal Padte Graduate Student
Neal studies how the division plane is positioned in fission yeast, particularly how positional information from the nucleus is translated to the site of contractile ring assembly at the cell cortex.

Roshni Basu Graduate Student
Roshni studies the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton in fission yeast. She is currently characterizing the formin inhibitor dip1p and trying to understand its role in the regulation of nuclear filamentous actin formation.

Kally Pan Graduate Student

Alumnni:

Anne Paoletti
Institut Curie, Paris, France

Phong Tran
University of Pennsylvania

Becket Feierbach
Princeton University

Tetsuya Takeda
University of Cambridge, UK

Rafael R. Daga
Centro Andaluz de Biologìa del Desarrollo, Seville, Spain

Sophie G. Martin
University of Lausanne

Robert J. Pelham
Princeton University

Sabina Zimmerman
University of California, San Franscisco

Scott V. Bratman
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

Jon Glynn
Michigan State University, East Lansing

Raymond Lustig
Juilliard School of Music

Ana Berlin
Mt. Sinai Medical School

Silvia Salas Pino
Centro Andaluz de Biologìa del Desarrollo, Seville, Spain

Joseph Lee
Bronx Community College

Koya Allen
United States Environmental Protection Agency