People

Lab Members

Carrie Nardella  carrie.nardella@yale.edu Carrie Nardella is the Administrative Assistant to the Emonet Lab.  Carrie worked in the Medical School from 1990 to 2000.  She returned to Yale in 2016 in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. In her free time she enjoys living on the shore and raising her 3 daughters.

PostDocs

 Jyot Antani, PhD jyot.antani@yale.edu.    Jyot is a joint postdoc with Paul Turner Lab. Jyot worked on his PhD with Pushkar Lele at Texas A&M University where he studied the sensory functions of the bacterial flagellar motor. He is currently developing a project to visualize and study the interactions between bacteria and bacteriophage- the viruses that infect bacteria. In his free time, Jyot enjoys reading fantasy novels, taking road trips to parks and beaches, cooking, and eating. 

 

Swayamshree Patra, PhD is a postdoc, working on the theoretical aspects of chemical navigation. She finished her PhD at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur under the guidance of Debashish Chowdhury where she developed theories for control and coordination of flagellar length in multiflagellated eukaryotes. In her free time she loves to explore new techniques of digital art for communicating her scientific projects.

 

Sam Brudner, PhD is interested in the mechanics of adaptive animal behavior. He studies how hungry fruit flies decide where to look for food based on patterns in the odors drifting over them. He was previously a grad student at Duke with Dr. Richard Mooney where he studied how young finches learn to imitate the songs of adult birds. He hopes that studying how animals solve tasks, we will broaden our understanding of what intelligence is, and how brains create it. Apart from neuroscience, Sam likes food, music, dancing, and learning about native plants and animals where he lives.

 

Graduate Students
Viraaj Jayaram Viraaj is a physics graduate student, having graduated from UChicago in 2019 with bachelor's degrees in math and physics. He is broadly interested in theoretical and computational biophysics and understanding information processing, decision making and optimality in biological systems. In his free time he enjoys playing and watching cricket, tennis and soccer, as well as playing board games, watching movies and trying out new restaurants with friends. 
 

Jeremy Moore jeremy.moore@yale.edu Jeremy is a graduate student in MCDB, having done his undergraduate degree in molecular biology at Kenyon College. He is interested in how bacteria make decisions in complex environments and is currently studying how they integrate information from multiple signals at once. In his free time, he enjoys playing piano, cooking, and video games.

 

Lam Vo Lam is a graduate student in MCDB. He studied chemotaxis in Azosprillium brasilense at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville during his undergraduate years under Dr. Gladys Alexandre. He is interested in studying spatial sorting in chemotaxis waves and the connection between virulence and chemotaxis in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. When he is not working, he loves watching random Youtube video, listening to music, and exercise. He's looking forward to going to the beach, exploring local boutique shop, and hunting for good restaurants. 

 Gustavo Santana gustavo.santana@yale.edu. Gustavo is a graduate student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. He completed his undergraduate in Computer Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, where he studied the ontogeny of vocal communication in mice. He is currently interested in understanding how flies explore spatial features of odor plumes for optimal navigation. In his free time, he spends too much money going to concerts, and enjoys playing guitar (please email me if you own a venue and need a band). 

 Eric Regis is a physics graduate student with interests in theoretical physics, statistical physics, and Bayesian inference. His research focuses on understanding how biological systems, especially bacteria, handle noise. When not engaged in academic pursuits, Eric enjoys watching basketball and playing chess. 

 

 

Undergrads

 Will Rosenbluth Will is an undergraduate majoring in Applied Math at Yale with a concentration in Computer Science. He is interested in modeling dynamical systems and is currently using biological modeling to study how olfactory receptor neurons adapt to temporal signals. He is also co-president of the Yale Student Chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, skiing, and rock climbing. 

 

Rafaela Kottou Rafaela is an undergraduate interested in studying biochemistry through the lens of mathematical modeling. She is currently trying to understand how different binding modalities affect the diversity of sensory parameters in bacterial chemosensing. In her free time, she writes for the Yale Daily News and enjoys spending time outdoors.

 
 

 

Agastya Rana Agastya is an undergraduate interested in applying mathematical and computational modelling techniques to biological systems. He is currently working on using data assimilation to quantify the cellular parameters that govern bacterial chemotaxis. In his free time, he enjoys swimming, playing basketball and finding new music to listen to.

 

 

Austin Theroux is an undergraduate student majoring in Earth and Planetary Sciences. He is broadly interested in evolutionary systems and environmental geomicrobiology. He currently studies the evolutionary dynamics of how E. coli develop resistance to bacteriophage chi, a virus that infects bacteria by first binding to the flagella. In his free time, he enjoys swimming, reading, and learning languages.

 
Thierry Emonet, PhD
PI
 

 

Alumni

Postdocs

Graduate Students

Postgraduate Students

  • Tomas Lamot, Graduate student at University of Namur in Belgium
  • Luca Rappez, Graduate student at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany
  • Noah Olsman, Graduate student at Caltech, Pasadena CA
  • Pedro Cisneros, Graduate student at UCSB, Santa Barbara CA
  • Sébastien Gillet, Graduate student at University of Namur, Belgium
  • Luis Hernandez-Nuñes, Graduate student at Harvard, Cambridge MA

Undergraduate Students

  • Ravi Balasubramanian, Graduate student at Princeton University
  • Ethan Brown, Bioinformatics analyst at Tempus Labs, Chicago
  • Jude Ong, Postgraduate researcher at NIH
  • Garima Singh, began job at SparkCognition
  • Helen Cai, began job at Epic Systems
  • Hope Anderson, graduate student at The University of Chicago
  • Charlotte Brannon, graduate student at Stanford University
  • Adam Fine,  graduate student at University of Chicago physics
  • Megan Ayers, graduate student at Yale University
  • Mattia Mahmoud, undergraduate at Harvard University
  • Abhishek Sethi
  • Adam Bildersee, software engineer at Google[x]
  • Faez Syed
  • Jennifer Wang
  • Michael Weiner, Graduate student Cornell University
  • Tobias Holden

Technicians

  • Ewa Chodakowski

Collaborators