Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Names Investigators, Builds Collaborative Culture
By Allison Proffitt
February 8, 2017 The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub has named its first cohort of 47 investigators from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco.
The interdisciplinary researchers each receive a five-year appointment and up to $1.5 million to conduct life science research in their respective areas of expertise. Their work spans microbial communities, cell imaging, computational microscopy, gene editing, bioelectronics platforms, and much more.
“New and exciting ideas are going to come from a diversity of backgrounds and approaches,” said Joe DeRisi, CZ Biohub’s co-president (with Steven Quake). “That means everything from people’s experience and their education to the disciplines they work in.”
The first cohort of investigators was chosen from an initial pool of 700 applications. An external and international panel of 60 scientists and engineers evaluated the entries and the CZ Biohub board finalized the 47 winners in a blind vote. DeRisi said that the final choices were “splitting hairs” because of the wealth of “fantastic applicants.”
Researchers didn’t apply to the competition with a traditional grant proposal listing specific aims. “The competition was very much about the person and not the project,” DeRisi said. “We were looking for people with fantastic backgrounds who have done and accomplished amazing things in their pasts, and betting on the possibility that they’re going to do amazing things in their future.”
Although DeRisi says gender, institution, and discipline balance were not specific criteria on which applicants were considered, 21 of the 47 chosen investigators are women and the researchers were generally balanced from each institution. The disciplines of the 47 investigators are wide-ranging.
“There was a bias in the competition toward early career investigators,” DeRisi said. “As a percentage of the pool, there were more early career investigators in the 47 than there were in the starting pool of over 700 applicants. I was very pleased with that.” DeRisi hopes that the impact of the program on early investigators’ careers will be significant.
Hub Culture
Now that the researchers have been announced, they’ll begin fitting into the CZ Biohub culture. The investigator cohort will have access to “dynamically allocated, project-based” lab space at the CZ Biohub facility, located in Mission Bay adjacent to the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, DeRisi explained. The Biohub will be staffed with engineers, data scientists, and a genome editing team, in support of the Biohub’s two launched projects: an infectious disease initiative, and The Cell Atlas.
(The Biohub is in the hiring process for those positions now, and DeRisi couldn’t resist a plug: “If you know some really talented people, I encourage you to send their CV to jobs@czbiohub.org!”)
The shared space—off campus from any investigator’s home institution—should facilitate teamwork, DeRisi said.
“It is meant to be a nexus of collaboration. We want the 47 investigators not to just hide away in their own labs at their universities. We want them to come to the Biohub and engage in new collaborations and do new things.”
CZ Biohub has also made significant investment in the equipment available at to investigators. DeRisi mentions genome sequencers, new microscopes, as well as “instruments that we’re going to build that are one-of-a-kind, unavailable anywhere”—all of which he expects to be a powerful draw to work and collaborate at the Biohub.
To augment that community, every two weeks DeRisi says the Biohub plans early results seminars. “Basically all the investigators are required to show up—that’s part of the agreement—and they have to present results that are not yet published.”
The “closed-door” meetings will encourage the investigators share active, ongoing work with their CZ Biohub colleagues, DeRisi hopes.
“I don’t want to hear your stuff you published last year! I want investigators to show up with cutting edge, with brand new [research], what hasn’t hit the pages yet. What’s dicey? What isn’t really resolved?” DeRisi expects the seminars to connect the 47 investigators as well as the Biohub’s internal staff with “what’s going on at the bleeding edge of science.”
Pre-Print Passion
The other bit of culture to which the new investigators will conform is CZ Biohub’s commitment to open science. Investigators have agreed to make their draft publications widely available through pre-print servers so their findings can inform the work of other researchers and accelerate scientific discovery.
It’s a topic DeRisi is particularly passionate about.
“For a long time I’ve been a major proponent of open access publishing,” he said. “Pre-print servers really take it to the next level. We’re asking people to put their submission-ready manuscripts on a pre-print server like bioRxiv.org... at the time they submit it to the journal.” In his own experience, DeRisi said, he’s seen papers “languish” in the review process for six months or more, a timeline he calls “ridiculous!”
“The scientific community is savvy enough to know how to look at information before it’s been peer-reviewed, and after it’s been peer-reviewed and so on,” he said.
But DeRisi is most excited about the data mining opportunities opened by preprint servers.
“There’s going to be really, really amazing deep mining and knowledge-based tools built on top of the pre-print servers. They’re going to allow data extraction and knowledge generation that’s never been possible with typical publishing journal houses, especially the ones that aren’t open access because they don’t allow full text searching.”
DeRisi sees vast possibility.
“It’s a whole new world! And the Biohub—we’re the ones pushing people toward that new world.”
The research areas of all 47 investigators are detailed online. But here’s the list of awardees.
From Stanford University
Catherine Blish, MD, PhD.
Carlos Bustamante, PhD.
Adam De La Zerda, PhD.
Polly Fordyce, PhD.
Judith Frydman, PhD.
William Greenleaf, PhD.
Brian Kobilka, MD.
Jure Leskovec, PhD.
Ada Poon, PhD.
Matthew Porteus, MD, PhD.
Manu Prakash, PhD.
Elizabeth Sattely, PhD.
Lucy Shapiro, PhD.
Christina Smolke, PhD.
Tom Soh, PhD.
Alice Ting, PhD.
Taia Wang, MD, PhD.
Ellen Yeh, MD, PhD.
James Zou, PhD.
From University of California, San Francisco
Adam Abate, PhD.
Hana El-Samad, PhD.
Adam Frost, MD, PhD.
Zev Gartner, PhD.
Bryan Greenhouse, MD.
Lisa Gunaydin, PhD.
Bo Huang, PhD.
Martin Kampmann, PhD.
Tanja Kortemme, PhD.
Hiten Madhani, MD, PhD.
Michel Maharbiz, PhD.
Alex Marson, MD, PhD.
Katherine Pollard, PhD.
Oren Rosenberg, MD, PhD.
Kole Roybal, PhD.
James Wells, PhD.
From University of California, Berkeley
Jillian Banfield, PhD.
Daniel Fletcher, PhD.
Amy Herr, PhD.
Markita Landry, PhD.
Rikky Muller, PhD.
Kim Seed, PhD.
Aaron Streets, PhD.
Yun Song, PhD.
Laura Waller, PhD.
Ke Xu, PhD.
Nir Yosef, PhD.
Wenjun Zhang, PhD.