Faculty Advisors & Contact Information

All undergraduates, including entering freshmen (who should also meet with their college advisor), should consult one of the MB&B Faculty Advisors assigned to their class for further information, advice, and for planning their course schedules.

Please consult the list of faculty advisors below.

Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS)

Christian Schlieker
(email to MBBUndergrad@yale.edu)

BASS 236A

(203) 432-5035

DUS Registrar

Elizabeth Vellali
(email to MBBUndergrad@yale.edu
KT 309 (203-432-2172) 

Majors Accepted to the B.S./M.S. Program

Christian Schlieker
(email to MBBUndergrad@yale.edu

BASS 236A

(203) 432-5035

Faculty Advisors for Each Class Year

2026 |2027|2028| First Years

 

Class of 2026

Lilian Kabeche

West Campus


Lily Kabeche was born in Caracas, Venezuela and moved to the US at an early age. She has lived in many states including Illinois, Washington, Maryland, and Florida. Lily attended the University of Miami, where she majored in Microbiology and Immunology (B.S. 2007). She then did her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Dartmouth College in Dr. Duane Compton’s lab, where she studied the mechanism by which kinetochore-microtubules are regulated in mitosis to promote proper chromosome segregation. She went on to do her post-doctoral work in Dr. Lee Zou’s lab, at Mass General Hospital, Harvard University, where she identified a novel role for the DNA damage repair kinase, ATR, in mitosis. She joined the Yale faculty in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Her current work uses a combination of cell biology, biochemistry and microscopy to investigate the non-canonical roles of the DNA damage repair pathway and to further understand the role of ATR in promoting genome stability.

 

Mark Hochstrasser

228 Bass

432-5101


Mark Hochstrasser majored in Biochemistry (and German) at Rutgers University in New Jersey and earned his PhD from the University of California at San Francisco.  He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. He started his own research group at the University of Chicago and then moved to Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, where he is currently the departmental chair.  His research is focused on the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Current interests include how this system of protein modification and degradation controls cell differentiation and responses to starvation and how endosymbiotic bacteria exploit this system to manipulate the reproduction of their eukaryotic hosts. His laboratory group uses a diverse array of genetic, biochemical, and cell biological methods.  Please click here to visit his lab webpage.

Allison Didychuk

418A BASS

432-0753


Allison Didychuk was born in northern Manitoba (Canada). Allison made her way south to the University of Jamestown in North Dakota, where she majored in Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics (B.S. 2012). She then did her Ph.D. in Biophysics with Samuel Butcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying the assembly of the yeast spliceosome (Ph.D. 2017). She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for postdoctoral training with Britt Glaunsinger, where she studied essential steps of herpesvirus replication. She joined the Yale faculty in 2022 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, where she continues to use diverse approaches - structural biology, molecular virology, and functional genomics - to understand how herpes viruses work.  Click here to visit the Didychuk lab webpage.

 

Class of 2027

Christian Schlieker

BASS 236A

(203) 432-5035

Christian Schlieker is an expert in dissecting cellular etiology of movement disorders, with a focus on nuclear compartmentalization and liquid-liquid phase separation. After undergraduate studies at the University of Bonn/Germany and the University of New South Wales in Sydney/Australia, Dr. Schlieker performed his PhD in Bernd Bukau’s laboratory at the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg, Germany. Here, he employed biochemical and biophysical tools to define the mechanism of Clp/HSP100 AAA+ ATPases in counteracting proteotoxic protein accumulation. He then joined the laboratory of Hidde Ploegh at Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute/MIT, where he worked on the ubiquitin/proteasome system and identified a novel role for a Ubiquitin-related modifier in RNA modification. 

Dr. Schlieker joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 2009, where he currently is Professor and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Schlieker received several awards including an NIH Director New Innovator award. He served on the scientific advisory board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation and numerous national and international review panels, including NIH (NCSD), DOD (Clinical Trial Neurological Disorders review panel) and the European Research council, amongst others. At Yale, Dr. Schlieker served as chair of the committee of majors for Yale College, and is presently co-director of the Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics and Structural Biology graduate program and a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery.

 

Nikhil Malvankar

WC Adv Biosciences Ctr

(203) 737-7590

Nikhil is fascinated by how electrons move in natural and human-made systems. During his Ph.D. at UMass, he worked on how electrons move in superconductors during his PhD in UMass which helped him study electrons moving in bacterial communities called biofilms using hair-like filaments called nanowires. During his postdoc, he learned structural biology and is now working on the structures, functions, and electron transfer mechanisms of protein nanowires. At Yale, he teaches quantitative methods in biology, senior projects, and writing workshops and has mentored more than 20 undergraduates in his lab. click here to visit this lab webpage.

Steven Tang

BASS 322

 

Class of 2028

Franziska Bleichert

YSB 345

+1 (203) 432-8411

Franziska Bleichert grew up in Germany, where she graduated from Medical School before moving to the US to obtain her PhD in Genetics from Yale University in 2010. She performed her postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, and then at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 2017, she started an independent research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, and joined Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry as an Assistant Professor in January 2020. Her research focuses on understanding the operating principles of macromolecular machines involved in chromosome replication and in the maintenance of genome stability using a combination of structural biology, biochemical, biophysical, and cellular approaches.

 

Ailong Ke

BASS 238A

+1 (607) 379-8158

Ailong Ke grew up in Beijing, China and came to the States for his Ph.D. training in Biophysics with Cynthia Wolberger at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He then did a three-year postdoctoral training at University of California, Berkeley, with Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna. In 2005, Dr. Ke joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he rose to the rank of Full Professor in 2017. Dr. Ke relocated his laboratory to Yale University in 2024. Dr. Ke is an expert in RNA biology, best known for his contributions to the mechanistic understanding of CRISPR-Cas systems. His laboratory also actively pursues novel applications of CRISPR-Cas technologies in research and medicine. Click here to visit the Ke Lab webpage.  

 

Karla Neugebauer

SHM C 123

+1 (203) 785-3322

 

Mark Solomon

BASS 218

+1 (203) 436-9053

 

First Year and Prospective Majors

All first years and prospective majors should meet with the DUS directly. They will then be assigned a faculty advisor for their MB&B career.

Christian Schlieker