Upcoming 2026 EVENTS
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Oscar Luo, MBA, CLS, MLS(ASCP)CM, SBBCM
Oscar Luo, MBA, CLS, MLS(ASCP)CM, SBBCM, is a laboratory professional specializing in immunohematology, currently serving as Manager of the Immunohematology Reference Laboratory for the American Red Cross in the Northern California Coastal Region. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Davis, and a Bachelor of Science in Medical Laboratory Science from the University of Washington, where he also completed his Clinical Laboratory Scientist training. Prior to joining the Red Cross, he spent approximately four years at the University of Washington Medical Center’s Transfusion Services Laboratory, building extensive experience in complex blood banking and transfusion support, which now informs his leadership in advancing safe and effective blood services.
https://sfsu.zoom.us/j/82133983760?pwd=4VWnOchrZWnYRWZFVWJ6TlTegFcFKb.1
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Faith Dukes, Ph.D.
Faith Dukes, Ph.D., serves as the Director of K–12, University, and Faculty STEM Education Programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she leads initiatives that connect cutting-edge scientific research with education and workforce development. With over 20 years of experience spanning research, informal science education, and federal policy, her work focuses on building pathways for the next generation of scientists and strengthening connections between research institutions and educators at all levels. Prior to Berkeley Lab, she developed innovative public-facing science programs at the MIT Museum and served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, where she contributed to national STEM education and workforce efforts. Trained as a physical chemist, she earned her Ph.D. from Tufts University studying photocatalytic semiconductors and holds a Bachelor of Science from Spelman College. Her career reflects a consistent commitment to bridging research, education, and policy in service of a stronger scientific workforce.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Lyndsay Rankin, Ph.D.
Coastal wetlands provide critical ecosystem services, including flood protection, habitat for diverse species, and long-term carbon storage, often exceeding that of terrestrial forests, making them essential for climate change mitigation. Lyndsay Rankin is a coastal scientist whose work in the San Francisco Bay–Delta focuses on understanding and quantifying these benefits to inform effective management and restoration. Her research integrates long-term datasets, including regional marsh vegetation surveys, with field-based measurements of soil carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes across natural and restored wetlands. By collecting and analyzing soil cores, she evaluates how organic carbon accumulates over time, while also examining how vegetation communities, microbial processes, salinity gradients, and tidal inundation influence carbon storage and emissions. Using greenhouse gas chamber analyzers, she measures carbon dioxide and methane fluxes to better understand the dynamic balance between carbon sequestration and release. Through this work, she aims to identify the key drivers of carbon cycling in coastal wetlands, providing science-based insights to support restoration strategies and enhance the resilience and climate benefits of Bay Area ecosystems.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Catherine Mageeney, Ph.D.
Catherine Mageeney is a principal member of the technical staff in bioengineering and biotechnology at Sandia National Laboratories, where she applies her expertise in phage biology and genetics to a wide range of challenges in bioscience. Her work centers on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, which are the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth, with an estimated 10³¹ yet to be fully explored. Mageeney’s research leverages this immense diversity as a versatile toolkit for solving complex biological problems, from combating infectious diseases to advancing applications in biomanufacturing, and biotechnology. With a strong background in molecular biology and microbial systems, she integrates genomic analysis, phage discovery, and functional characterization to better understand and harness phage-host interactions. Since her early introduction to phage research as an undergraduate at Cabrini College, she has built a career in discovery-driven science and now leads and mentors researchers, fostering the next generation of scientists while advancing innovative, phage-based solutions.
WetLab Workshop with Vivek Mutalik’s Team (in-person) :
Workshop: The Mutalik lab from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab will conduct a 5 (full-)day workshop at San Francisco State University. The workshop will provide scholars training in bacterial culturing, Phage Isolation, and Phage genome extraction.
Mutalik Lab Interests: Led by Dr. Vivek Mutalik, the Mutalik Lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory focuses on advancing microbial and bacteriophage biology using high-throughput approaches to functionally characterize genes from microbes and phages, including those in metagenomic samples. The lab investigates the mechanisms of phage–host interactions and their roles in antibiotic resistance and host fitness, while also engineering phages and microbial communities for applications in biotechnology and medicine, including the design of phage–antibiotic therapies and synthetic genetic tools.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Graham Hatfull, Ph.D. (in-person)
Graham Hatfull is the Eberly Family Professor of Biotechnology and an HHMI Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he serves as the lead scientist for the SEA-PHAGES program, guiding its overall scientific vision and research goals. Trained in the United Kingdom, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh and completed postdoctoral research at Yale University and the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK with renowned scientists including Fred Sanger. His research focuses on understanding the biology and genetics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis, by leveraging Mycobacteriophages—viruses that infect mycobacterial hosts—as powerful experimental tools. Using the fast-growing model organism Mycobacterium smegmatis, his work explores how phages can be used to investigate mycobacterial gene function and develop innovative molecular tools, advancing efforts to better understand and ultimately combat one of the world’s most persistent infectious diseases.
IN-PERSON at San Francisco State University, CA
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Simon Roux, Ph.D.
Simon Roux is a staff scientist at the DOE Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he leads the Viral Genomics group studying viruses that infect microbes and their roles in natural ecosystems. His work combines multi'omics, bioinformatics, and experimental approaches to uncover viral diversity, virus–host interactions, and their impacts on microbial communities in environments such as soils and freshwater systems. Roux is also a key contributor to the development of widely used computational tools and data resources for analyzing uncultivated viruses, with a broader goal of understanding how viral activity shape ecosystem function and evolution.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Wei Gordon, Ph.D.
Wei Gordon is a genetics researcher and educator whose work bridges cutting-edge science with student-centered learning, currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Biology at Menlo College. With a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California, San Francisco, Gordon has built a multidisciplinary career spanning comparative and functional genomics, developmental biology, and science education, including research on metabolic adaptations in fruit-eating mammals with implications for diseases like diabetes. Her academic path reflects a consistent commitment to both discovery and teaching, having instructed students across institutions such as UCSF, the University of San Francisco, and UC San Diego, while also engaging younger learners through public school education initiatives. Wei Gordon brings a collaborative, curiosity-driven approach to science, with a focus on expanding access to STEM and preparing students to contribute meaningfully to rapidly evolving fields like biotechnology and genomics.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Gary Trubl, Ph.D.
Gary Trubl is a microbiologist and research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose work focuses on understanding viruses and their interactions with microbial communities in environmental systems, particularly soils. His research integrates meta-omic approaches and techniques such as stable isotope probing to characterize virus–microbe dynamics and their broader impacts on ecosystem processes and biogeochemical cycles. With academic training spanning a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and earlier degrees in environmental sciences, Trubl’s interdisciplinary interests include microbial ecology, virology, astrobiology, and biotechnology. He is also committed to education and outreach, emphasizing the role of scientists in mentoring and shaping future generations while advancing knowledge of how viruses influence microbial physiology and ecosystem function.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Shannon Bennett, Ph.D.
Shannon Bennett is a virologist and science leader who serves as Chief Science Officer and Dean of Science and Research Collections at the California Academy of Sciences, where she oversees the institution’s global scientific research, exploration efforts, and vast collection of nearly 46 million specimens. Her research focuses on understanding infectious diseases—particularly mosquito-borne viruses like dengue—and their connections to environmental change, while also advocating for the importance of sustained scientific research in addressing global challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and public health.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.
Wallace Marshall is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco whose research explores the fundamental design principles that govern how cells build, organize, and regenerate their structures. With a background spanning electrical engineering and biochemistry, his work integrates physical, mathematical, and engineering approaches to understand how cellular systems encode shape, control organelle size, and carry out complex behaviors, often using single-celled organisms as model systems. His lab employs a combination of genomics, imaging, and computational modeling to investigate processes such as pattern formation, cellular architecture, and regeneration, contributing to a broader understanding of how biological systems function as dynamic, information-processing entities.
Phage Power Hour Speaker: Marie Gourdet, BSN, MSN, Ph.D.(candidate)
Marie Gourdet is a registered nurse, health policy scholar, and current PhD candidate in the Nursing Health Policy program at the University of California, San Francisco, where she also earned her master’s degree in the same field. Drawing on more than a decade of experience as an emergency room nurse in both North Carolina and California, her work is grounded in frontline clinical care and a commitment to addressing structural health inequities. Her research focuses on the intersection of HIV and people who use drugs, examining how overlapping social, structural, and behavioral factors shape access to prevention and treatment—an urgent public health challenge, as HIV continues to disproportionately impact marginalized populations including people who inject drugs. Building on this focus, her recent publication contributes to the growing body of research aimed at health outcomes for underserved communities, particularly by highlighting gaps in current approaches and the need for more equitable, person-centered interventions.
JGI Bioinformatics workshop Day 1 (virtual) : Tentative Schedule
Introduction to JGI/Bioinformatics Workshop
(Simon Roux, Natalia Ivanova, and Rekha Seshadri)
JGI: The DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is an AI-driven genomic science facility supporting DOE missions in energy and biotechnology. It generates and analyzes large-scale genomic and metagenomic data from plants, fungi, and microbial systems, providing researchers with open-access tools and datasets to study complex biological processes and advance environmental and biotechnological applications
JGI Bioinformatics workshop Day 2 & 3 (in-person) : Tentative Schedule
In-person: Berkeley, CA
JGI/Bioinformatics: Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics Workshop:
Hands-on training program designed to teach researchers how to analyze and interpret viral genomic and metagenomic data using the Integrated Microbial Genomes & Microbiomes (IMG/M) system. Participants engage in practical exercises involving comparative analysis, visualization, and interpretation of sequencing datasets. The workshop also provides foundational overviews of sequencing technologies, genome assembly, annotation, and metadata curation