Michael McManus, PhD

Dr. McManus's lab has a strong technology component, and uses systematic and synthetic approaches to conquer fundamental problems in understanding gene function in health and disease. He maintains a very diverse research program, encouraging students and postdocs and research technicians to follow their research interests, by developing new tools and approaches to solve long-standing problems in their field of interest. Having successfully trained in different areas (plant molecular biology, molecular parasitology, RNA biology, and human development/disease) his broad language for basic science has expanded his appreciation of systems biology. Consequently, his ability to integrate diverse sources of information has helped develop innovations and ideas that he have shared with other labs, yielding high impact discoveries in multiple fields throughout his career. This includes several examples where he has derived novel approaches in team settings and applied them to basic biology that intersects human disease and complex biological systems. He was awarded tenure in 2010 in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UCSF, and a year later bestowed the Vincent and Stella Coates Endowed Chair. Dr. McManus has appointments or is a member of the Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Diabetes Center, the Eli & Edythe Broad Center for Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and the Innovative Genomics Institute.

His awards and distinctions include a WM Keck Award, New Technologies Award, Breakthrough Technologies Award, NIH Transformative Research Award, and Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation. Although Dr. McManus's career started in RNA biology, his publications and grants indicate an increasingly trend to merge computational and synthetic biology to address systems biology questions related to human disease.