Principal Investigator

William Buchser
Assistant Professor
After graduating from the University of Miami with a degree in Music Engineering, Willie realized he could apply his computational and signal processing skills to the biological questions in neurophysiology and joined Zhongmin Lu’s lab in the Department of Biology in 2002. He then started working on his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, rotating under great scientists like Steve Roper and Vittorio Porciatti. He joined Vance Lemmon & John Bixby’s laboratory studying neuron regeneration and started getting involved with data-driven approaches to science. He then did his first postdoctoral training under Michael Lotze at the University of Pittsburgh looking at heterotypic interactions between cancer cells and immune cells. His second postdoctoral training took him to Washington University where he worked with Jeff Milbrandt on the mouse shRNA screen that discovered the SARM1 protein. He got his first faculty position at the College of William & Mary in Virginia in 2013. He then returned to St. Louis and joined the Department of Genetics at Wash U in 2017.
Lab Members

Colin Kremitzki
Research Lab Manager

Jason Waligorski
Research Lab Manager
Jason joined the Buchser Lab in 2019 as part of F.I.V.E. in order to focus on functional genomics. He works primarily on developing the F.I.V.E workflow, concentrating on high-content screening, single-cell and molecular biology, and LIMS. Before working in the Buchser Lab, he spent most of his 20-year tenure working for Washington University at the McDonnell Genome Institute, where he helped to sequence Chromosomes 2 and 4 as part of the Human Genome Project. He also oversaw the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project, Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine, and Centers for Common Disease Genomics as a member of MGI’s project management group. He enjoys spending time with his family, watching hockey and baseball, golfing, and coaching youth sports.

Graham Bachman
Bioinformaticist

Purva Patel
Bioinformatics Research Analyst

Mallory Wright
Research Technician

Serena Elia
Research Technician

Lina Ali
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Diana Grigore
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Lab Alumni

Kylan Kelly
Research Technician

Marianna Vakaki
Research Technician

Vinay Chandrasekaran
Research Technician

Samah Nour
Research Technician

Bay Johnson
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Jack Bramley
Staff Scientist

Alex Yenkin
Research Technician
Alex has been with the Buchser Lab full-time since July 2019 after working as an undergrad in the lab for a year. He graduated from Washington University in 2019 with a Bachelor’s in Genomics and Computational Biology, and has put that degree to much use by spending many hours sitting at his desk scrolling through FASTA files. Outside the lab you can find Alex baking, reading, or any other indoor activity that will help avoid getting a sunburn.

Mariel Liebeskind
Research Technician

Eileen Xu
Research Technician

Kate Matsunaga
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Will Lee
Undergraduate Research Assistant

Silas Kuang
Undergraduate Research Assistant