I am a molecular biologist who enjoys developing models and tools to dissect or engineer cellular behavior.
Wet Lab
My PhD research focused on modeling oncogenic fusion genes involving transcription factors to understand how they drive ultra rare cancers. As a PhD candidate in Ross Okimoto’s lab at UCSF, I built models to dissect the biology of fusions defined by rearrangement of the transcriptional repressor capicua (CIC).
For my postdoc I joined the Schmidt Science Fellows community to explore my interest in synthetic biology within the context of plants, where I hope to build approaches to leverage transcription factors as tools for engineering phenotypes in cells. I am pursuing this work in Jenn Brophy’s lab at Stanford.
During my PhD, my favorite wet lab technique was cloning (the creativity is addictive), while one of my ever-present side projects was to be a better fluorescent microscopist (see: photography as a hobby).
Dry Lab
I strongly believe in researchers being fluent in both generating data and processing it. To this end, I mainly use R and bash scripting to work with anything from IHC staining scores to raw NGS data.
I’ve used or taken classes in IDL, Java, Python, R, and bash scripting, including a fully computational rotation in the lab of Dr. Marina Sirota in my first year at UCSF. In the fall of 2022 I was exceptionally fortunate to take the Advanced Sequencing Technologies & Bioinformatics Analysis course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which helped to train me in full-pipeline processing of NGS data. During my PhD I was the acting bioinformatician for the Okimoto lab, and helped not just our own lab members but also collaborators with data analysis.
My favorite R functions are pivot_longer and pivot_wider (from tidyr, they always seem like magic), while my least favorite kind of bioinformatic data analysis is gene ontology analysis (I rarely find it informative & would rather just read the gene list manually).
Selected References by Main Type of Contribution
Mainly Wet Lab
- Popescu, B., Stahlhut, C., Tarver, T. C., Wishner, S., Lee, B. J., Peretz, C. A. C., Luck, C., … and Smith, C. C. (2023). Allosteric SHP2 inhibition increases apoptotic dependency on BCL2 and synergizes with venetoclax in FLT3- and KIT-mutant AML. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(11), 101290. doi: 10.1016/j.xcrm.2023.101290
Both
- Luck, C., Luo Y., Vasileva E., Jacobs, K.A., Riad, J., Macaraig, C. D., Ponce, R. K. M., Amatruda J. F., and Okimoto, R. A. (2026). Modeling of Capicua Family Fusion Oncoprotein-Driven Cancers Reveals Gene-Specific Functionality. Molecular Cancer Research. doi: 10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-25-0624
- Luck, C., Jacobs, K. A., and Okimoto, R. A. (2024).
The Capicua C1 Domain Is Required for Full Activity of the CIC::DUX4 Fusion Oncoprotein. Cancer Research Communications, 4(12). doi: 10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-24-0348
Mainly Dry Lab
- Schott, C. R., Koehne, A. L., Sayles, L. C., Young, E. P., Luck, C., … and Sweet-Cordero, E. A. (2024). Osteosarcoma PDX-Derived Cell Line Models for Preclinical Drug Evaluation Demonstrate Metastasis Inhibition by Dinaciclib through a Genome-Targeted Approach. Clinical Cancer Research, 30 (4): 849-864. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-23-0873
- Kim, J. W., Luck, C., Wu, W., Ponce, R. P., Lin, Y. K., Gupta, N., and Okimoto, R. A. (2022). Capicua suppresses YAP1 to limit tumorigenesis and maintain drug sensitivity in human cancer. Cell Reports, 41(1), 111443. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111443
See my Google Scholar page for a more complete list of publications.
