Dr. Edward Chang is Professor of Neurological Surgery and co-Director of the Center for Neural Engineering at UC Berkeley and San Francisco. Dr. Chang’s clinical expertise is surgical therapies for intractable epilepsy, trigeminal neuralgia, pain, hemifacial spasm, and adult brain tumors.

In the Laboratory for Musculoskeletal Crosstalk, we leverage interdisciplinary approaches in bioengineering, endocrinology, and physiology to determine molecular mechanisms of tissue crosstalk in osteoarthritis. Our work aims to delineate fat-cartilage signals that contribute to osteoarthritis susceptibility and pain to generate a new class of regenerative medicine-based therapies. We use in vitro and in vivo approaches, induced pluripotent stem cells, CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering, mouse models, human tissues, and state-of-the-art multi-omic spatial approaches.

Dr. Zev Gartner is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and is co-Director of the UCSF-based, multi-institution Center for Cellular Construction. He graduated from UC Berkeley and earned his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University in 2004. He is working to understand how cells assemble into multicellular tissues; how the structure of tissues coordinate the behavior of individual cells; and how changes to tissue structure drive the progression of diseases like cancer. Toward these goals, he and his lab build, perturb, and model human tissues in vitro using techniques from the chemical, engineering, physical and biological sciences.

Dr. Sunita Ho is a bioengineer who focuses on studies related to biomineralization, biomechanics, and biomaterials. She is a Professor in the Department of Urology, School of Medicine, and in the Department of Preventive and Restorative Dental Sciences (PRDS), School of Dentistry. Dr. Ho focuses on site-specific interventions to mitigate the beginnings of pathologic formations of biomaterials in humans. She investigates the regenerative aspects of soft and hard tissue attachments within craniofacial and musculoskeletal joints. Using biomechanics and mechanobiological approaches, Dr. Ho maps the special and temporal aspects of “mechano-responsiveness.”

Dr. Jeffrey Lotz, Ph.D., holds the David S. Bradford, MD, Endowed Chair in Orthopaedic Surgery and vice chair for research. He has earned several awards for spine research, and serves as a deputy editor for the journal, Spine. Dr. Lotz is the founding director of the UCSF Core Center for Musculoskeletal Biology in Medicine and the NSF Center for Disruptive Musculoskeletal Innovations, and corresponding PI for the newly established Center for Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Tissue and Organ Regeneration (C-DOCTOR). He has expertise in spine biomechanics, intervertebral disc biology, and tissue engineering.

Dr. Seth Shipman's research focuses on cellular systems in the midst of change. His lab seeks to better understand how the order of transcriptional events during development can drive changes in cell fate, and to better intervene in diseases characterized by change, like progressive neurodegeneration and cancer. His lab takes a molecular engineering approach, leveraging the versatility of DNA as a programmable biological polymer to gather data without destroying cells, and deliver therapeutics that can modify their effect based on cell context.