Hi, I'm Brent. My work sits at the intersection of chromatin biology, cell signaling, and computation. I'm a PhD candidate at the Salk Institute in Diana Hargreaves' lab, where I study how BAF (mSWI/SNF) chromatin remodeling complexes interpret cellular signals to control cell fate.
Fascinated by chromatin's ability to buffer noise and encode memory, I aim to understand and leverage these properties to develop new approaches to cell engineering and therapeutic design. My research has been published in Nature, Nature Methods, Cell Stem Cell, Cell Reports, The Journal of Immunology, and others, with first-author research papers in Immunity and the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, and invited commentary in Nature Genetics and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
Before Salk, I did my MA at UCSB with Max Wilson, using optogenetic tools to interrogate signaling dynamics. Earlier, I worked with Gay Crooks and Chris Seet at UCLA on stem cell-derived T cell development, contributing to the Nature Methods paper describing artificial thymic organoids and follow-up work in Cell Stem Cell and Cell Reports. I started in research as an undergraduate at UCSD in Stephen Hedrick's lab.
I'm joining industry in 2027 with a focus on epigenetic engineering, cell therapy, and AI×bio companies in the Bay Area. If you're working on hard, interesting problems in any of those areas, I'd love to get in touch.