Shashank Gandhi

About Shashank Gandhi

Currently, I am a Miller Research Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. I recently completed a one-year term as a Schmidt Science Fellow in Dr. Hans Clevers\' lab at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, Netherlands. I graduated from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech, Pasadena with a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology under the supervision of Dr. Marianne Bronner. My thesis work in her lab took a systems-level approach to address the long-standing question of what confers an embryonic stem cell population, the cardiac neural crest, with its unique ability to form cardiovascular derivatives. I uncovered the gene regulatory circuitry that controls the acquisition of cardiac neural crest identity and used it to reprogram other neural crest populations to a cardiac-crest-like fate (Gandhi et al, eLife, 2020; Gandhi et al, Dev. Cell 2020). In parallel, I developed new tools for chick developmental biology to enable these discoveries, including methods for genome engineering (Gandhi et al, Dev. Biol, 2017) and retroviral lineage tracing (Gandhi et al, Development, 2021).Before Caltech, I received a master’s degree in Systems Biology and Bioinformatics from New York University. In Dr. Lionel Christiaen\'s lab at the Center for Developmental Genetics, I adapted CRISPR-Cas9 loss-of-function methods to the marine invertebrate Ciona intestinalis (Stolfi, Gandhi, et al, Development, 2014), and identified molecular mechanisms that govern a fate-switch between head and heart muscles from bipotent precursors. I also devised a machine-learning-based approach to identify and predict the efficiency of all possible guide RNAs targeting the Ciona genome, a database that is publicly available on the UCSC genome browser (Gandhi et al, Dev. Biol, 2017).

Experience

1. Miller Research Fellow

   Uc Berkeley Miller Institute For Basic Research In Science

   Sep 2021 — Present · Berkeley, CA, US

Education

• Caltech

  Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Developmental Biology

  2015 — 2021

• UIET, Panjab University, Chandigarh

  Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Biotechnology

  2008 — 2012

• New York University

  Master of Science (MS), Bioinformatics and Systems Biology

  2013 — 2015

Skills

• Site-Directed Mutagenesis
• Matlab
• Gel Electrophoresis
• Molecular Cloning
• Python
• Microarray Analysis
• Computational Biology
• R
• Molecular & Cellular Biology
• Fluorescence Microscopy
• Immunohistochemistry
• Programming
• Systems Biology
• Mysql
• Agarose Gel Electrophoresis
• Sequence Analysis
• Primer Design
• Rt-Pcr
• Bioinformatics
• Genetics
• Rna Isolation
• Cgi Programming
• Dna Extraction
• Pcr
• Biostatistics
• Electroporation
• Tissue Culture