People in the Chang Lab

Fred Chang, M.D., Ph.D.

Fred is a second-generation Chinese American who grew up in California. He was an undergraduate at Princeton University, and was introduced to research in the labs of Dale Kaiser (Myxobacteria), Austin Newton (Caulobacter) and Gerry Reaven (Type II Diabetes). He went to UCSF for his M.D. PhD. For his doctorate work, he worked with Ira Herskowitz and discovered how a negative growth factor regulates the cell cycle and cell shape in budding yeast. For his postdoc, he worked with Paul Nurse in Oxford and London, where he began genetic studies on cytokinesis in fission yeast. He also extended his postdoc at David Drubin's lab at UC Berkeley. He started his own lab in 1997 at Columbia University Medical Center in the Department of Microbiology in New York City. In 2016, he and the lab moved to UCSF in San Francisco, where he is currently a Professor in the Cell and Tissue Biology Department. He is an advocate for LGBTQ+ scientists and is currently co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Committee at the American Society of Cell Biology.

See his CV and Diversity Statement

Fred is an avid violinist and plays in orchestras and chamber music groups. see his Music CV

Email: fred.chang ”at” ucsf.edu. Twitter: @fredchanglab

Arthur T Molines, Ph.D.

Arthur was born in France. He grew up near Paris and spent most of the holidays at the small family farm where his father grew up. Being in contact with nature is probably what led him to biology. For his PhD research, Arthur studied microtubule network organization in Arabidopsis thaliana. He moved to California in 2017 to join the Chang lab where he studies how cytoplasmic density affects cellular processes such as cytoskeletal dynamics. 

Arthur enjoys photography and travel.

Website: https://www.atmolinesscience.com/

Paula Real, M.Sc. Research Specialist

Joël Lemière, Ph.D.

Joël obtained his PhD at the Physico-Chimie Lab at Curie Institute – University Paris Diderot – CNRS in Paris, France. Working with Dr. Cécile Sykes, he designed biomimetic systems to study cell shape change under controlled conditions. He used in-vitro systems to mimic shape changes in plasma membrane that occur at the rear of the cell due to acto-myosin contraction, at the leading edge by actin polymerization and at endocytic sites. He then joined the Berro Lab at Yale U. to work on the link between clathrin-mediated endocytosis machinery and membrane tension in S. pombe. In 2018 he joined the Chang Lab to study the regulation of nuclear size and the effects of compressive forces on S. pombe. 

He likes cooking and plants. 

Catherine Tan, graduate student

Catherine was born and raised in a small desert town in Southern California. Hoping to be closer to the ocean and more people, she attended the University of California, San Diego to study Bioengineering with a focus in Bioinformatics. As an undergrad, she was part of the Bing Ren Lab, where she studied genome architecture and gene regulation. Catherine is now a PhD student in the Biomedical Scientist graduate program at UCSF. In the Chang lab, she is studying macromolecular crowding in the nucleus and DNA repair in fission yeast. 

Catherine enjoys the outdoors and music events.

Zhidong Tan, undergraduate student