Takebe Lab

Hasan Al Reza, MS
Student
hasanal.reza@cchmc.org

Hasan hails from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Dhaka in 2015 and 2016, respectively. While there, he worked on the association of MDM2 SNPs with Lung Cancer. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in the Molecular and Developmental Biology PhD program at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. His work in the lab focuses on understanding fibrotic liver disease and its association with other organs, with a broader interest in regeneration.

W. Clark Bacon, MS
Research Assistant IV
willis.bacon@cchmc.org

Clark completed his M.S. in Cancer and Cell Biology at the University of Cincinnati in 2007. He has since worked as a Research Assistant both at UC and at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where his work has focused on applying integrated automated systems to perform high throughput genetic and small molecule screening. He is using this technology to rapidly identify novel genes involved in disease and to build disease specific human model systems to test drug safety and efficacy.

Yuqi Cai, PhD
Research Associate
yuqi.cai@cchmc.org

Yuqi received her PhD in pathophysiology and cell biology from Zhejiang University, China. Her previous research covers cancer initiation/metastasis mechanisms, lung vasculature development and drug screening for vascular diseases. She joined Takebe Lab in 2018. Her work focuses on cell-cell communication and developing a drug induced liver injury model for large scale drug screening for the CuSTOM core at Cincinnati Children's.

Andrew Dunn, PhD
Research Fellow
andrew.dunn@cchmc.org

Andrew received his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2013 and his PhD in Materials Science in 2018 from the University of Cincinnati (UC), Cincinnati, Ohio. His academic research while at UC, in collaboration with PIs from the College of Pharmacy, Physics, and Cincinnati Children’s, focused on the utilization of ceramic and polymeric nanoparticles for therapeutic applications ranging from hyperthermic ablation to nucleic acid delivery. He joined the Takebe Lab in 2018 and is focusing on polymeric-based cell barcoding and the identification of novel peptides targeting iPSC lines and differentiated tissues utilizing phage display and next-generation sequencing.

Kentaro Iwasawa, MD
Research Fellow
kentaro.iwasawa@cchmc.org

Ken obtained his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Tsukuba, Japan. He has nine years of experience in hospital and clinic settings, with Board certification in Pediatrics and Gastroenterology in Japan. He was involved in bed-to-bench research focusing on pediatric liver diseases before joining Takebe lab in 2018 as a Research Fellow. His work focuses on generating multi-organ organoids, in particular the hepato-biliary organoids, to study cholestatic liver diseases.

Masaki Kimura, PhD
Research Associate
masaki.kimura@cchmc.org

Masaki earned his PhD in medical science from Chiba University, Japan. His graduate work was focused on epigenetic aberration of small cell lung cancer. From April 2010, he worked on generating vascularized and functional human organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in Yokohama-City University. In August 2016, Masaki joined Dr. Takebe’s Lab as a Research Associate at Cincinnati Children’s. He mainly works on the establishment of the in vitro organoid model from iPSC. His area of expertise includes cell biology, molecular biology and biochemistry.

Kyle Lewis, PhD
Research Fellow
kyle.lewis2@cchmc.org

Kyle obtained his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine in 2017. There, he studied molecular mechanisms of liver regeneration and liver cancer. He joined the Takebe lab in April 2017 as a Research Fellow, where his current research is focused on modeling fetal liver development, including early hematopoiesis.

Andrew Lu
Student
andrew.lu@cchmc.org

Andrew Lu is a senior St. Xavier High School. He joined the Takebe lab in June of 2018 as a student to study laboratory techniques and develop organoid sorting mechanisms. His current project focuses on developing microfluidic devices to facilitate and expedite the drug screening of liver diseases using human liver organoids. Andrew will be attending Harvard University in the fall of 2020 to study biomedical engineering and molecular and cellular biology.

Mihika Sharma, MS
Research Assistant II
mihika.sharma@cchmc.org

Mihika obtained her Masters degree in Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology from IBAB, Bengaluru, India. Prior to her work in Takebe Lab, she was working as a Clinical SAS Programmer at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, India. She was involved in restructuring and analysis of raw data from clinical trials. In Takebe Lab, Mihika works as a Bioinformatician and also analyses Single Cell RNA sequencing data.

Wendy Thompson, PhD
Research Assistant IV and Lab Manager
wendy.thompson@cchmc.org

Wendy obtained her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Northwestern University. She joined the Takebe Lab in 2017 as Lab Manager.