Nolan received his BS and PhD in Botany and Plant Science from the University of California Riverside, using image analysis and chemical genomics to understand endomembrane trafficking. He went on to do a postdoc at UCLA, using single cell sequencing to understand the role of micro RNA in B-cell Lymphoma. At the Ellison Institute, Nolan is a Senior Computational biologist where he works with the various research groups to facilitate biological insight through statistical analysis, data mining, and data visualization. He also helps run the microscopy working group meetings and spearheads an internal workshop aimed at teaching basic programming to bench biologists. Outside of work Nolan loves to spend time with his two kids, Olivia and Leonard, swing dance with his wife Samantha, and runs a monthly logic puzzling event called Puzzled Pint.

Emily Kearney worked on ecosystem services in agricultural environments for her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Claire Kremen. After graduating from ESPM in 2019, she made the switch to data science in NYC with the help of the Insight Fellowship. She is now a data scientist at a small start-up (Arena.io) that helps reduce bias and increase retention in hiring, especially in healthcare settings. She loves working in the private sector on impactful work with her small but dedicated and highly collaborative team. Her team leadership and technical skills from her PhD helped her with this transition but it was her outreach (e.g. BASIS, Dinner with a Scientist) and non-profit work (e.g. Director, Unconscious Bias Project) that set her apart in the private sector.

Hi I'm Hoang Vuong, a UC Riverside Microbiology PhD alumni (Fall 2019), from the McFrederick Lab in Entomology. Long before my time at UC Riverside, I grew up in Oakland, CA and later attended UCLA for his degree in Molecular Biology. Currently, I am a scientist in the R&D team of a start-up, Symbiome, based in San Francisco. My main line of work involves identifying and characterizing unique and novel microbes to develop for integration into skin care products. The work breaks out into two portions, a bioinformatics portion to assemble microbial genomes and analyzing microbial ecology data and wet-lab molecular microbiology portion studying microbe-microbe and microbe-host cell interactions. When I'm not at work you can find me practicing motorcycle techniques at a nearby parking lot, playing catch-up on the hot series six months ago on Netflix, or joining a DnD session with friends.