CENTER FOR PHYSICAL GENOMICS AND ENGINEERING AT MCCORMICK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Friday, April 25, 2025

9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Simpson-Querrey Auditorium and Potocsnak Family Atrium
Room 1-230
303 E. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60611
Northwestern University’s Chicago campus

Join Northwestern’s Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering on April 25 for a full-day symposium that will feature invited talks from seven internationally renowned researchers in genome structure and dynamics, imaging, modeling, engineering, and more.

The symposium will include interactive discussion panels in the morning and afternoon, an extensive lunchtime trainee poster session, and opportunities for interaction and networking with leaders in this exciting and rapidly growing transdisciplinary field of science.

Register now

Geeta Narlikar , Keynote Speaker

University of California, San Francisco

Geeta Narlikar is professor and chair in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. She also holds the Kuo Family Professorship and the Albert Bowers Endowed Chair in Biochemistry. She obtained her PhD in chemistry at Stanford University and carried out postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School.

Narlikar studies how genome folding and compartmentalization is regulated to generate the many cell types that make up the body. Her laboratory has pioneered the application of sophisticated biophysical approaches to study the mechanisms of macromolecules that regulate genome organization. Through these studies they are learning how nanoscale molecular motors cause mechanical disruptions in a highly crowded packaged genome; that the smallest unit of genome folding, a nucleosome, acts akin to a dynamic receptor rather than a static packaging unit; and that liquid-liquid phase separation processes can help organize and sequester large regions of the genome.

Carlos Aguilar

University of Michigan

Carlos Aguilar joined the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor as an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in 2017 and was promoted to associate professor in 2023. He is the associate director of the BioInterfaces Institute and a faculty member in the Cellular and Molecular Biology program. He earned his BSE in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and his MSE and PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he won the George J. HeuerJr. PhD Endowed Graduate Fellowship and HENAAC Graduate Student Leadership Award. After completing his PhD, Aguilar was a member of the technical staff in the Bioengineering Systems and Technologies Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory until 2016.

Aguilar has instantiated an interdisciplinary research group that centers on understanding and engineering the molecular networks governing skeletal muscle processes with a particular focus on transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of muscle stem cells. Current projects include the analysis and manipulation of muscle stem cells after trauma and in aging.

Timothy Downing

University of California, Irvine

Timothy Downing has been on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, since 2016, where he holds a primary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He also maintains a courtesy appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Downing received his BS in chemical and biological engineering in 2008 from Northwestern University and PhD in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. As a Ford Foundation and UNCF/Merck Fellow, Downing completed his postdoctoral training in stem cell epigenomics at Harvard University and the Broad Institute (Cambridge, Massachusetts). He has earned both the NIH (DP2) New Innovator Award and the “Rising Star” Award from the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Special Interest Group within the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Downing’s research explores new and innovative approaches to cell and tissue engineering. He is particularly interested in understanding how the genome is regulated through non-sequence-based changes to DNA (epigenetics) during healthy tissue development and disease progression.

Ying Hu

University of Illinois Chicago

Ying Samuel Hu is an assistant professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering (affiliate) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). His research develops fluorescent labeling and imaging techniques to study communications within and between immune cells at the nanoscale. His goal is to identify spatial and temporal regulation mechanisms to modulate immune cells for therapeutic purposes. He received his BS in electrical engineering from the University of Houston in 2006 and PhD in bioengineering from Rice University in 2011. He pursued postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology and Salk Institute for Biological Studies. While at Salk, he developed super-resolution microscopy techniques to investigate heterochromatin structures in human embryonic stem cells and the spatial organization of T cell membrane receptors.

Hu joined UIC in 2018, and his research is supported by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, National Institutes of Health, and Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

Ana Pombo

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Ana Pombo received her PhD in physiological sciences from the University of Oxford in 1998. She was a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow until 2000 and then became a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Systems (MRC-LMS). In 2012, she founded the Integrative Biology Section at MRC-LMS and became a professor in cell biology at Imperial College London. In 2013, she moved to Germany as a group leader at the Max Delbrück Center - Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (MDC-BIMSB) and became a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2019-2024, she served as deputy scientific director of MDC-BIMSB and from 2022-25, as vice-speaker of the Systems Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease research program at MDC. She co-coordinates the DFG Priority Program SPP2202 and has been a member of the NIH Common Funds 4D-Nucleome consortium since 2015.

Her research focuses on 3D genome structure in gene expression and cellular memory, pioneering high-resolution imaging and genomics technologies.

Tamar Schlick

New York University

Tamar Schlick is a professor of chemistry, mathematics, and computer science at New York University. She received her PhD in applied mathematics from the Courant Institute of Science. After a postdoc fellowship at the Weizmann Institute working with the late Shneior Lifson, a pioneer of molecular mechanics, she joined the faculty of NYU.

Schlick is recognized for developing innovative mathematical and computational tools for biomolecular modeling and simulation and applying them to important biological problems involving nucleic-acid complexes, including DNA polymerase mechanisms, chromatin folding, and RNA structure and function. Her current interests focus on epigenetic regulation of gene expression in cancer processes, viral RNA frameshifting mechanisms, and novel RNA motif design by inverse folding. She has published more than 275 papers and has trained more than 100 postdoctoral fellows, undergraduate, graduate, and highschool students. She is a member of several editorial boards and advisory committees in mathematics, computational biology, and chemistry.

Andrew Spakowitz

Stanford University

Andrew Spakowitz received his BS in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1999, and he defended his PhD thesis in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 2004. He was a postdoctoral scholar in molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2004-06. Spakowitz joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford as an assistant professor in August 2006. He currently serves as the Tang Family Foundation Chair of Chemical Engineering.

Spakowitz’s research addresses fundamental chemical and physical phenomena underlying a range of biological processes and soft-material applications. Current research in his lab focuses on four main research themes: chromosomal organization and dynamics, protein self-assembly, polymer membranes, and charge transport in conducting polymers. A common thread in his work is the need to capture phenomena over many length and time scales, and flexibility in research methodologies provides his lab with the critical tools to address these complex multidisciplinary problems.