Blog

Time for another yearly update on the comings and goings in the Vance Lab. 

1. We said so-long and see-you-later to a few colleagues. Stefan Fattinger returned to his native Switzerland after a successful postdoc to take a job as a medical liaison at Astra Zeneca (and somehow still managed to get his paper published after he left). Marian Fairgrieve graduated with her PhD and is now pursuing a postdoc in Dan Campbell’s lab at the Benaroya Institute in Seattle. Her PhD work is on bioRxiv. Duke Yuvaraj also left us to start his PhD work at the University of Washington. All are sorely missed!

2. We welcomed several new colleagues: new graduate students Wendi Deng and Abby Burtner, and a new Research Specialist in the lab, Gabe Mitchell. See the separate blog posts below. Gabe will be spearheading new Shigella efforts in the lab. Wendi Deng is bravely tackling TB. Abby is joining the ETI branch of the lab. It’s great to see the lab replenish itself!

3. Big congratulations are in order to Kevin Eislmayr, who we are excited to announce will be starting his own lab at St. Jude’s in the new and up-and-coming Department of Host-Microbe Interactions chaired by Victor Torres. Kevin’s lab will be focusing on Shigella and he will be joining an outstanding group of colleagues in Memphis. We will miss Kevin and his strange ideas about UNO, but we are excited to see what the Eislmayr Lab discovers! 

4. The year started off with the Barton-Vance 20 Year Lab Reunion. It was gratifying to see so many lab members return to Berkeley for the occasion. The party was a big success, as witnessed by the size of the bar bill (photo below).

5. The lab also celebrate two fantastic weddings. In September 2025, much of the lab traveled to the spectacular Tuscan countryside for the wedding of graduate student Bianca Parisi and Noa Kerner. In April 2026, we then visited New Jersey to attend the wedding of former graduate student Brenna Remick and Max Weiss. Great cocktails were served and fun was had by all (photos below).

6. Marian and Janet both walked in the May Commencement ceremony. Congratulations to both! See photos below!

7. In May 2026, former graduate student Mary Fontana published an important book, Strangers in the Province of Joy. The book recounts the fascinating history of Annunciation House, a refuge for immigrants on the US/Mexico border. If you are curious to see how a fantastic scientist can also be a fantastic writer, buy it here — it contains valuable insights for all of us. And since it was authored by Mary you can be sure it is very well-written and extremely thought-provoking (with no typos in the title!…that’s an inside joke).

8. A highlight of the year was having Walter Adams join us for his sabbatical. He quickly integrated himself into the lab culture as he dished out a daily dose of his signature science puns. He also left us a fantastic departing gift — a new lab clock! We remember Walter fondly every day as we try to figure out what time it is…

9. Last but not least, it was also a big year for Russell — he passed his qualifying exam (aka HHMI Renewal) and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, a big honor that is due directly to all the amazing trainees that he has been fortunate to have in the lab over the past 20 years. Thank you all!

The lab is delighted to welcome two new graduate students to the lab, Abby Burtner and Wendi Deng.

Another year has passed—time for a website update! Here is some of what has happened in the past year:

1. First, The Vance Lab has welcomed a new postdoctoral fellow, Tong Zhang. Tong completed her graduate work in Michael Laub’s lab at MIT where she worked on phage defense systems in bacteria (paper, paper). Prior to her time in Boston, Tong was a undergraduate at Cal—so, welcome home Tong! Tong is joining the lab as the lab’s first ever Miller Fellow.
2. It will be a banner year for PhD students—two students, Brenna and Elizabeth, walked in the May commencement (see photo below); and Marian plans to submit her thesis by the end of the year.
3. Arthur Cheng passed his qualifying exam (of course he did!). He also got married! So it has been a big year for doctoral candidate Arthur.
4. Speaking of weddings…the lab just celebrated the nuptials of Charlotte and her now husband Ben at Tuolumne Camp in Yosemite (photos below). What a terrific event! Tong was also just married, and at least 2 more weddings are in the works (stay posted!).
5. The lab underwent a long overdue renovation/refresh. New paint, new benches, new shelves, refinished cabinets—same crowded and messy conditions! But it has been a definite improvement.
6. The lab bid farewell to Dmitri Kotov, who has started his own lab at Washington University. His lab is off to a fast start (he even has his first senior-authored paper on bioRxiv already!) Congrats Dmitri!
7. The lab also bid farewell to Kristen Witt, who has started a postdoc in the Stetson Lab at UW. Kristen’s most recent paper from her PhD was also just published. We are all excited to see what she does next!
8. We are having a joint 20 year Vance-Barton Lab Reunion this coming weekend. Over 70 former trainees are returning to campus for a symposium, picnic, and Bocce Tournament of Champions.

We are thrilled to announce that Arthur Cheng will be joining the lab as graduate student #23 (!). Arthur is himself surprised to be joining the Vance Lab, as he didn’t really imagine that he would join an immunology lab for his PhD. However, his project will be to decipher the mechanism by which the SP140 chromatin regulator represses gene expression — so more “immunology-adjacent” than pure immunology.

Arthur grew up in China and attended San Diego State University for his undergraduate work. He worked for three years in Anjana Rao’s Lab at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, studying DNA methylation and cancer. In his spare time, Arthur enjoys fishing and snowboarding. He is excited to learn about the coevolution of pathogens and the immune system.

In other good news:

– Bianca Parisi passed her qualifying exam with flying colors and has thus assumed her position as PhD Candidate (#22).

– The 20 year Barton-Vance lab reunion has been announced. Dates are: June 20-22, 2025 (more than a year from now). Contact Russell if you were inadvertently left off the invite list and you want to come.

– Several folks have left (or are leaving) the lab for greener pastures: Ella Brydon, Ophelia Lee, and Joshua Mao are all starting PhD programs on the east coast in the Fall. Congrats to all of them on their accomplishments!

– Kristen Witt obtained her PhD in December and is considering her next moves while finishing up her paper as a postdoc in the lab.

– The lab is undergoing a renovation! We will be getting new benchtops, a new paint job, and refinished cabinetry. We are temporarily moving into the former Winoto Lab space while the work is being done.

– After a hiatus of several years, the Sugar Daddies (aka Greg and Russell) returned as champions of the annual Barton-Vance Bocce Tournament, defeating the Caramelizers (aka Dmitri and Stefan). As a result, Greg and Russell retain the rights to decide which lab meeting they don’t want to hear (or can sell the rights to the lab meeting exemption to a needy lab member).

There are several good pieces of news to report:

(1) Former postdoctoral fellow Patrick Mitchell has been announced as an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. This will provide significant support for his new and rapidly growing lab at the University of Washington. Congrats Patrick!

(2) We have just welcomed a new graduate student to the lab, Bianca Parisi. Bianca will be working on a collaborative project with the lab of Filipa Rijo-Ferreira at Berkeley. Bianca grew up in Italy and attended UCSD for her undergraduate studies. She then completed a Master’s degree in Sue Kaech’s lab at the Salk. We are thrilled to have her join the lab!

(3) More good news: Our current second year PhD student, Charlotte Langner, has passed her qualifying exam! The lab threw Charlotte a fantastic party with a circus theme, in honor of Charlotte’s passion for acrobatics. See photo below.

(4) And last but not least, two of our current postdoctoral fellows (Kevin Eislmayr and Stefan Fattinger) have each recently welcomed new members to their families. Baby Eli Eislmayr was born in November 2022, and Baby Anea Fattinger was just born a few days ago! The future of science is looking bright 🙂

The lab is excited to welcome a new postdoc — Grace Liu, who has transplanted herself from Boston, where she was a student in the Sabatini and Perrimon labs. As a graduate student, Grace did some beautiful work identifying nutrient sensors in Drosophila. For her postdoc, Grace is excited to pursue new pathways of “effector-triggered immunity” in vertebrates. Grace is happily adjusting to life in California—and gloating to all her friends on the East Coast. She is looking forward to seeing Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the SF Opera in a few months.

We are all delighted to welcome Charlotte Langner to the lab for her PhD. Charlotte hails from Missoula, Montana where she went to college before spending two years at the NIH as a postbac in Jason Brenchley’s lab studying interactions between the microbiome and SIV. Outside of lab, Charlotte enjoys the great outdoors and is an aficionado of partner acrobatics. No cartwheels in the lab please, Charlotte!

We are delighted to welcome Kevin Eislmayr and Stefan Fattinger as two new postdoctoral fellows to the lab.

Stefan is from Switzerland where he conducted his PhD on Salmonella, jointly mentored by Wolf-Dietrich Hardt (at ETH Zürich) and Mikael Sellin (at Uppsala, Sweden). As a graduate student Stefan published papers demonstrating the role of TNF in intestinal tissue destruction and the mechanism of Salmonella entry into gut epithelial cells in vivo. Stefan will be leaving the gut and will focus on M. tuberculosis lung infections during his postdoc.

Kevin is from Austria where he conducted his PhD with Pavel Kovarik at the University of Vienna. Kevin’s PhD concerned the surprising non-redundancy of IL-1 alpha and IL-1 beta. In contrast to Stefan, Kevin will be moving his interests into the gut, and will be studying Shigella pathogenesis in our new in vivo model.

With the recent departure of Mortiz Gaidt for greener pastures, we delighted to have now replenished our supply of native German speakers. Wecome to Berkeley, Kevin and Stefan!

The Vance Lab is thrilled to officially welcome our newest graduate student, Janet Babirye, to the lab. Janet hails from Kampala, Uganda, and attended Makerere University. During her MSc, she studied alternative diagnostic biomarkers for tuberculosis under Dr. Misaki Wayengera. She first visited Berkeley in 2019 as a visiting student to Sarah Stanley’s lab, before deciding to join the MCB program at Berkeley for her PhD. She is excited to continue working on host-pathogen interactions in the Vance Lab. For her PhD, Janet will be studying the adaptive immune response to Shigella flexneri, taking advantage of our new mouse model for Shigella that makes possible physiologically relevant in vivo immunological analyses of this important pathogen for the first time. In her free time, Janet enjoys dancing, running, hiking, and cooking. We are delighted to have Janet join the Vance Lab!