People

Ben Donovan, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Riverside. He did his PhD research in Michael Poirier's lab at the Ohio State University where he used single-molecule approaches to probe the mechanisms by which transcription factors gain access to their sites in chromatin. After graduating, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Dan Larson's lab at the National Cancer Institute where he studied the dynamic quality control mechanisms of splicing. At UCR, the lab seeks to advance single-molecule approaches to directly visualize spliceosome assembly in cells and to relate these kinetic mechanisms to downstream gene expression.

Bixuan Wang, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral researcher in the Donovan Lab at UCR. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she investigated RNA splicing sequence features using machine learning and statistical modeling under the supervision of Dr. Steve Mount and Dr. Dan Larson. Following her doctoral work, she conducted research on splicing prediction algorithms and RNA splicing evolution in the Burge Lab at MIT. Her current research focuses on RNA splicing regulation, with particular emphasis on cryptic splicing isoforms and their role in human disease.