Current Team

Cambrian Liu, PhD (Group Leader)

Cambrian is a Research Assistant Professor who started at UChicago in mid-2021. His interdisciplinary research background encompasses intestinal stem cell biology, molecular and cellular imaging, bioinformatics, and neuroscience.

Esabella Yon (Laboratory Technician)

Esa joined us in spring of 2024 after completing her undergraduate degree from Loyola. Esa’s projects involve genetic engineering of gastrointestinal organoids to drive wound healing, studying the relationship between metaplasia and cancer, and imaging the human GI tract in IBD.

Isabella Vari (Laboratory Technician)

Bella joined us in the summer of 2024 after a brief stint in ballet school and finishing her undergraduate education at Loyola. Bella’s projects entail studying clonal evolution in intestinal inflammation and identifying molecular predictors of therapeutic response in IBD.

Omar Kousa (Undergraduate, Lake Forest College)

Omar joined us in fall of 2023 as a 3rd-year undergraduate student at Lake Forest College. His project involves optimizing conditions for the culture of skin-like cells obtained from various sites in the body.

Jingwen Xu (PhD graduate student, UChicago)

Jingwen joined us in 2023 as a 2nd year PhD student at UChicago, where she is co-mentored by Gene Chang. Her project involves studying the interactions between intestinal epithelial stem cells and the microbiome.

Collaborators

Chris Weber, MD, PhD

Chris is a gastrointestinal pathologist at UChicago who assists with the provision and interpretation of human tissue for the lab’s basic and translational research initiatives.

Gene Chang, MD

Gene is Cambrian’s career development award mentor at UChicago. Cambrian’s lab is independent but embedded within Gene’s overall research space. Gene’s lab studies the regulation of the intestinal microbiome in health and disease.

David Rubin, MD

David is the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at UChicago and is a clinical collaborator with expertise and an extensive publication record in inflammatory bowel diseases.

Brent Polk, MD

Brent is the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at Rady Children’s Hospital at UC San Diego. Brent was Cambrian’s postdoctoral mentor at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and was responsible for first introducing to Cambrian the important scientific questions related to tissue regeneration in the intestines.

Alumni

Martin Kalski (M.D. Candidate, Stritch School of Medicine)

Martin obtained his bachelor’s of science from Loyola and worked as a technician in the lab from 2021-2023, after which he left to begin medical school at Stritch. Martin temporarily re-joined us in the summer of 2024 to do a specialized, short-term research project on the spatial distribution of immune cells in inflammatory bowel disease.

Keit Dine (M.D. Candidate, Stritch School of Medicine)

Keit obtained his bachelor’s of science from Loyola and worked in the lab from 2023-2024. His project involved 3d confocal imaging of mouse and human inflammatory bowel disease tissue, communicating with and enrolling patients as part of the lab’s translational research program, and performing organoid cell culture experiments. Keit left the lab to begin medical school at Stritch/Loyola in 2024.

Kristina Williams (undergrad summer research, 2023) – graduated from Case Western

Michelle Luszczewski (undergrad summer research, 2023) – now undergrad at NYU

Maddie Chan (high school summer research, 2023) – now student at Walter Payton HS

Nariya Cooke (undergrad summer research, 2025) – now undergrad at Howard

Funders