Meet our team!

People

Post-doctoral Scholars

Marc Gastou PhD

Post-doctoral Research Fellow

Department of Pediatrics - Medical Genetics

Marc is a name given only to the best. Marcs' don't come along often and when they do hold onto them because you won't find someone like him. When life is letting you down he is the one who will always be there by your side.

Marc works on Gaucher disease. He is trying to develop a cure for Gaucher disease type 1 and an approach that could help the neuronopathic forms like type 2 and type 3.

Previous Institution: Universite De Paris Vii, Universite De Montpellier

Hyunmin Cho, PhD

Post-doctoral Research Fellow

Department of Pediatrics - Medical Genetics

I am a stem cell biologist interested in new therapeutic strategies for patients with genetic disorders. My current research goals are the utilization of hematopoietic stem cells, CRISPR/Cas9 mediated genome editing, and improvement of therapeutic efficiency of stem cell therapy. I get great pleasure when my research efforts support my goal of connecting a bench to bedside.

Previous Institution: Seoul National University

Edina Poletto

Incoming Post-doctoral Research Fellow

Edina has always worked with genetic diseases, from molecular diagnosis to developing new therapies. During her PhD, she spent a year at the Gomez-Ospina lab as a Visiting Student Researcher, working mainly with genome editing of hematopoietic stem cells for mucopolysaccharidosis type I.

Previous Institution: Gene Therapy Center, Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Fun Fact: She enjoys hiking, sewing and feeding Brazilian cheese bread to lab members!

Lab Staff

Pasqualina (Lina) Colella, PhD

Senior Research Scientist

Department of Pediatrics - Genetics

Pasqualina (Lina) Colella is Research Scientist in the Gomez-Ospina group and she is focused on developing improved HSPC-based approaches to treat neurometabolic diseases. Lina received her MS in Biology at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy), her PhD in Human Genetics from Open University (UK) at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM, Italy) and was awarded Postdoctoral fellowships from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (EU) and Genethon (France). Lina is interested in developing effective gene and cell therapies for untreatable diseases and has expertise in the field of in vivo AAV gene therapy and genome editing for inherited retinal degenerations and lysosomal storage diseases.

María Valentina Suárez-Nieto

Life Science Research Professional

Department of Pediatrics - Genetics

Valentina recently graduated from Stanford where she studied Biology with a concentration in Neurobiology, and minored in Human rights and Data Science. She is interested in stem cell therapy and regenerative research, and hopes to pursue a career in this field as a physician-scientist. Having grown up in Villavicencio, Colombia, Valentina enjoys dancing salsa during her free time, and volunteering in her community.

Moises Rivera

Lab manager

Graduated from San Jose State University while working in the biotech/bioresearch since 1990. I first joined Dr. Theo Palmer's lab in 2005 and since then I have been helping great people in the lab to get their projects done I spend my time helping lab members with anything they may need not only in the lab, but also outside the lab. In my spare time, I enjoy playing soccer and building and repairing anything around the house.

Graduate Student

Alvaro Amorin

Graduate Student

Medical Scientist Training Program

Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine

According to urbandictionary.com Alvaro knows how to strike conversations, he can be quite the charmer, the best aspect of Alvaro would be his giving nature, he often gives his all and even after keeps on giving.

In the lab, he works on developing a stem cell therapy for a devastating disease known as Krabbe. He is using a combined transplantation approach using the patient's own modified cells to correct symptoms in the central and peripheral nervous system

Undergraduate Students

Ruhi Sayana

Undergraduate Student

Stanford University

Ruhi is an undergraduate student interested in the biomedical and biocomputational sciences. She has been in the Gomez-Ospina Lab since the spring of 2020, when she remotely worked on analyzing whole genome sequencing data. Her current work involves developing cellular tools to enable the rapid analysis of lysosome metabolomics, with applications in discovering currently unknown mechanisms of lysosomal storage disorders such as NCLs. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, going to the beach, and baking.

Andrea Leon Tenorio

Undergraduate Student

Stanford University

Andrea is an undergraduate at Stanford majoring in bioengineering. She is currently working on a project that aims to demonstrate a missense mutation in the DNASE1L3 gene results in abnormal enzyme activity leading to inability to degrade DNA. In the future, Andrea hopes to pursue both medicine and research. In her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, dancing bachata, and baking.

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