Professor
UC Department of Pediatrics & Division of Developmental Biology, Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation
Associate Director
Digestive Health Center (UC/Cincinnati Children's)

aaron.zorn@cchmc.org

Zachary (Zak) Agricola, BS
Research Assistant III
zachary.agricola@cchmc.org

Zak earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Dayton in 2013. He joined the Zorn Lab in 2013 and initially investigated interactions between myeloid cells and foregut progenitors in development. He characterized a number of genes expressed in primitive myeloid cells. In 2017, he shifted his research focus to tracheoesophageal development. He is presently investigating the role of hedgehog signaling in TE development and, more generally, the cell biology that governs TE septum resolution.

Nicole Edwards, PhD
Research Fellow
nicole.edwards@cchmc.org

Nicole received her PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of Western Ontario (Canada) in 2018. There she studied the role of a Shc adaptor protein in mouse blastocyst development and stem cell pluripotency. Nicole joined the Zorn lab in July 2018 as a Research Fellow to study the genetic and cellular basis of trachea-esophageal birth defects. She is interested in how Hedgehog-Gli signaling controls normal development of the trachea and esophagus. Additionally, she uses a high throughput, CRISPR-Cas9-based system in Xenopus to screen candidate patient genetic variants and model structural birth defects of the trachea and esophagus.

Malcolm Fisher, PhD
Research Associate
malcolm.fisher@cchmc.org

Malcolm received his PhD in Biology at the University of York, UK. His research covered the role of fibroblast growth factors in early mesoderm specification in Xenopus. Malcolm then had a post-doctoral position at the Wellcome Trust Center in Dundee, using emerging 3D imaging technologies to characterize digit identity specification in chick. Malcolm then had further research positions with the Medical Research Council, working with the Electronic Mouse Atlas of Gene Expression group, and the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. Malcolm then moved to Cincinnati Children's in Cincinnati to join the biocuration team at Xenbase, the Xenopus model organism database.

Julia-Grace Dunn
Lab Support Tech I
juliagrace.dunn@cchmc.org

Julia-Grace is currently a second-year medical sciences major at the University of Cincinnati. She has worked in the Zorn lab for about a year, performing both wet lab experiments and computational analyses. Her focus is studying how the Wnt pathway achieves specificity in different developmental contexts, particularly through the distinct roles of the TCF / LEF proteins.

Andrea Holderbaum, BS
andrea.holderbaum@cchmc.org

 Andrea completed her bachelor of science degree in biology and English language at the Ohio State University in 2012. There she studied molecular mechanisms of ultraviolet radiation-induced carcinogenesis during primary melanoma formation. Andrea joined the Zorn lab in July 2020 as a Graduate Student in the molecular and developmental biology program to study the morphogenetic basis of trachea-esophageal malformations. She is interested in how gene regulatory networks direct cell-environment interactions to accomplish separation of the trachea and esophagus during organogenesis. She utilizes mouse and Xenopus animal models to identify morphological effector targets downstream of foregut transcription factors.

Sophia Hsin-Jung Li, PhD
Research Associate
hsin-jung.li@cchmc.org

Sophia's research focuses on building a gut tube outside the body using iPSC and microfluidics. She wants to use these human organoid models to study diseases and host-microbe interactions. Her previous research discovered how bacterial ribosome activity differs under different metabolic stress and established a human mitoribosome ribosome profiling method with codon precision. She grew up in Taiwan, went to MIT for undergrad training in Chemical Engineering, and got her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Her favorite organelle is mitochondria.

Christina James-Zorn, PhD
Research Associate/Scientific Curator, Xenbase
christina.james_zorn@cchmc.org

Christina earned her PhD in Zoology at the University of Queensland (Australia) in 1998. Her research covered phylogenetics and conservation biology in some very cute, tiny Australian tree frogs. Her postdoc projects in the UK focused on genetic diversity in isolated populations of grassland butterflies and insects (Univ. Birmingham) and mountain-top ferns (Natural History Museum, London). Since 2011, Christina has been a lead scientific biocurator for Xenbase, the Xenopus model organism database. Biocuration is like being a ‘data librarian’, capturing as much genetic, phenotypic, genomic and proteomic data from published articles and other knowledgebases as possible. Xenbase curators collate all this information in a single web-accessible, open-access resource for biomedical researchers around the world. 

Adhish Kashyap
Lab Support Tech I
adhish.kashyap@cchmc.org

Adhish graduated from Reynoldsburg High School in 2020 and is currently an undergrad at the University of Cincinnati. He is in his second year, majoring in medical sciences and minoring in public health. He works to study tracheoesophageal defects in Xenopus, using a CRISPR-Cas9 based system to screen candidate patient genetic variants and model structural birth defects of the trachea and esophagus.

Keishi Kishimoto, PhD
Visiting Scientist
keishi.kishimoto@cchmc.org

Keishi received his PhD in Molecular Biology from Nagoya City University in Japan in 2013. He characterized fad104 gene, an uncharacterized gene whose expression was temporally increased during adipogenesis, as a novel regulator on lung development and osteogenesis. In January 2014, he moved to RIKEN in Japan as a postdoctoral research scientist. During that time, he worked on mouse tracheal tube morphogenesis and demonstrated that synchronized mesenchymal cell polarity and differentiation shape the trachea. In January 2019, he joined Cincinnati Children Hospital Medical Center to start collaborative activity between RIKEN and Cincinnati Children's. He focuses on in vitro modeling of trachea-esophageal development.

Leslie McCoy
Lab Support Tech I
leslie.mccoy@cchmc.org

Virgilio Ponferrada, PhD
Research Associate
virgilio.ponferrada@cchmc.org

1990-1994: BSc, Denison University, OH
1994-1999: PhD, Wright State University, OH
2000-2010: Research Fellow, Division of Developmental Biology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
2011- present: Research Associate, Xenbase

Scott Rankin, MS
Senior Research Assistant & Lab Manager
scott.rankin@cchmc.org

2000: BA, zoology, Miami University, OH
2002: MS, zoology, Miami University, OH 
2002-present: Senior Research Assistant, Lab Manager

Senior Specialist, Program Management

olesya.rockel@cchmc.org

Nivitha Sundararaj
Analyst, Bioinformatics
nivitha.sundararaj@cchmc.org

Konrad Thorner
konrad.thorner@cchmc.org
Analyst, Bioinformatics

Konrad Thorner received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Cornell University in 2017 and his master’s degree in bioinformatics from Boston University in 2020. His prior research experience spanned from host-pathogen dynamics to cancer immunology. Since then, he has been a bioinformatics analyst for the Division of Developmental Biology and Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM). He collaborates with multiple labs with a focus on next-generation sequencing analysis, especially single-cell, and developing new tools and pipelines.