Team

The Michnick-Serohijos Supergroup (Summer 2022)

Principal Investigator

Stephen Michnick

Stephen did his bachelors and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto under the direction of Jeremy Carver and did postdoctoral training at Harvard University with Martin Karplus (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2013) and Stuart Schreiber. He trained principally as a biophysical chemist, studying structures and binding of complex cell surface carbohydrate- and protein-protein interactions and mechanism of protein folding. At the heart of all of his work, protein chemistry remains central, but he has developed an eclectic and diverse research program aimed at studying the organization and dynamics of biochemical networks in living cells and how these networks compute cell-fate decisions.

Lab Manager

Philippe Garneau

Philippe is the lab manager and has been a member of the lab since 2017. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. in molecular microbiology from Laval University in Québec, and completed graduate studies in Bioinformatics at UQàM. He has extensive work experience in molecular and cellular biology. He is involved in most of the yeast-related projects, particularly on their large-scale PCA aspects. Philippe is the person of contact for all things robotic for the lab.

Senior Research Associate

Minoo Karimi

I did my doctoral work at the RIKEN in Tokyo, Japan and now I am enthusiastically dedicated to unraveling the dynamic of biochemical networks! I have developed a groundbreaking approach that combines cutting-edge CRISPR, Microfluidics and next-generation sequencing technologies to engineer toolkits for proteome-wide manipulation and monitoring of protein abundances and protein-protein interactions. With these methods I aim to discover both natural and chemically-induced de novo protein-protein interactions that could lead to the development of novel therapeutic molecules.

Lab Technicians

Parastoo Morteza Zadeh

Parastoo currently works at the university of Montreal’s department of biochemistry and molecular medicine as a Research Technician. Before joining us, she graduated from Kharazmi University of Tehran with a Master of Biology degree. The current focus of her research is to determine how proteins are distributed in mammalian cells, and measuring their abundances. She also assists with various other projects in the lab.

Mathieu Colas

I graduated from a bioengineering school in France and hold an M.Sc in biology. Before finishing my studies, I completed a 6-month internship in a research laboratory in Montréal. I really loved it and decided to stay in Québec, where I worked for 2 years as a research assistant. I am now a research technician at UdeM in the Michnick lab where I mainly work on cell culture.

Post-Docs

Rini Ravindran

Rini Ravindran earned her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from LSU Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, LA, USA studying ubiquitin-dependent regulation of protein phosphatase 1 (PP1). In 2020, Rini joined the Michnick lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow and has been studying the mechanism of protein import into peroxisomes, which are small dynamic organelles performing crucial processes like lipid metabolism. Peroxisome biogenesis is unique in transporting folded and even oligomeric proteins into their lumen. However, to date no pore structure has been visualized on the peroxisome. Rini’s research shows that key peroxisomal membrane proteins form transient transport channels by undergoing liquid-liquid phase separation with a cytosolic carrier and cargo proteins.

Ali Jahanabad

Ali is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the University of Montreal. His research interests focus on the proteome-wide analysis of induced dimerization effects on mammalian cell fitness. Prior to his current position, Ali completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cameco Multiple Sclerosis Neuroscience Research Centre (CMSNRC) and the University of Saskatchewan, where he investigated the molecular pathways involved in demyelination and relevant models in multiple sclerosis. Ali earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Biochemistry from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran. His doctoral research examined the therapeutic potential of oligodendrocytes in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis.

Lidice González

Lidice’s research main focus is to study the consequences of local and global chromatin mechanics on adaption and genome stability in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. She also works on understanding the role of different amino acid sequences, particularly low complexity regions in proteins that form biomolecular condensates in the cell under stress conditions. Lidice completed her PhD in Biochemistry in our lab in 2022.

Arnab Barua

Previously, in my Ph.D. I was investigating the process of cellular decision-making in uncertain complex environments and during my Master’s I was working on statistical mechanics of quenched semi-flexible polymers. My interests are broadly distributed in the interface of Mathematical Biology and Theoretical Biological Physics. The working areas belong from Theoretical Cell Decision-Making to understanding the principles behind protein-protein interaction network architectures. To understand better these areas, I use various tools of mathematical modeling from Decision theory/Game theory to Information theory and from Stochastic processes to Statistical mechanics.

Doctoral Students

Nasrin Mobasheri

Nasrin did her bachelors and Masters in Microbiology at Azad university in Iran. She performed her masters project at University of Tehran under the direction of Dr. Javad Hamedi to study Electrochemical properties that play role in determining Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) of antibiotics against pathogens. She gained results as a novel rapid method for determining MIC as a critical assay in medical microbiology, registered a national patent and published in Springer US. Nasrin is currently a PhD student in Biochemistry, her research focuses on measuring protein-protein interactions in induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS) and iPS-derived neuroprogenitor cells to map out compositions, spatiotemporal dynamics, and the structural topology of protein-protein interaction networks in human stem cells.

Master Students

Xavier Castellanos-Girouard

Coming to us with a bachelors degree in Biochemistry from Université de Montréal, Xavier is currently pursuing a Master’s in Bioinformatics to expand his knowledge on computational analyses of biological networks. His research project focuses on the topological and thermodynamic properties of biological networks.

Undergraduate Interns

Alumni

  • Coming soon…