Helen took the lab’s four graduate students to lunch to celebrate grad student appreciation week. Thank you to Angeline, Anna, Christina and Elina for all you do!

April 2025

Read the article, Frogs, genes, and cellular antennae: Unlocking the biology of autism, here.

April 2025

Helen, Kate and Bianca traveled to Cold Spring Harbor lab for the 2025 Xenopus course. Bianca attended as a student in the course, Kate returned as TA and Helen was a lecturer.

April 2025

Kate’s paper, Autism gene variants disrupt enteric neuron migration and cause gastrointestinal dysmotility, is live on Nature Communications. You can read it here.

March 2025

Helen and Elina traveled to Pomona, CA to attend the Cilia & Mucus Gordon Research Conference. Elina presented a poster and Helen gave a talk.

February 2025

Dr. Bianca Graziano has joined the lab as a postdoctoral scholar. She will be focusing on the autism-associated gene STXBP1 in cilia development.

February 2025

Kate was awarded one of three honorable mentions for the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring.

January 2025

Kate gave her exit talk and is now officially a postdoc! Big congratulations to Dr. McCluskey.

January 2025

Elina’s new paper was highlighted by The Transmitter. Read their article here.

January 2025

Elina’s preprint is live on bioRxiv! Check it out here. Congrats to Elina!

December 2024

James Schmidt has a new preprint live on bioRxiv. Read it here. Congrats to James and co-authors!

November 2024

For the second year in a row, Elina won best poster award at the DSCB retreat. Way to go, Elina!

October 2024

Helen, Elina, and Angeline attended the DSCB retreat in Pacific Grove. Angeline was one of the students who gave a talk and did an amazing job!

October 2024

Helen co-organized the Xenopus Resources and Emerging Technologies Meeting at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA.

October 2024

BMS first-year graduate student, Michelle Seeler, started a rotation in the lab. Welcome!

September 2024

Nia Teerikorpi has a new BioRxiv preprint that you can check out here. Congrats, Nia!

July 2024

James and Elina traveled to Philadelphia to attend the STXBP1 Conference.

July 2024

Helen’s new paper, Modelling human genetic disorders in Xenopus tropicalis, was published in Disease Models & Mechanisms. You can read it here.

June 2024

Delfina González joined the lab as a postdoc! Delfina received her PhD from Yale in May and will be moving to the Bay Area in August.

June 2024

Neuroscience graduate student, Anna Grigsby-Brown, has joined the lab! She rotated in the Willsey lab in Fall 2023 and officially became a frogger in June 2024.

After a productive rotation, Angeline Chemel officially joined the lab as a grad student. Welcome!

June 2024

We toasted postdoc, Micaela Lasser, on her four years in lab and wish her well in her new position at CALM at UCSF.

June 2024

Congratulations to Elina, who traveled to St Paul, Minnesota to give a talk at the FASEB Cilia Conference.

May 2024

James presented a poster at the biannual Bay Area Cytoskeleton Symposium at UC Berkeley.

May 2024

Graduate student, Kate McCluskey, has a new BioRxiv preprint that you can check out here. Congrats, Kate!

May 2024

Elina gave a lightning talk at the Confab and James presented a poster.

May 2024

Kate, Christina and Helen all traveled to Cold Spring Harbor lab in New York to attend the Xenopus course. Kate was a TA, Christina was a student, and Helen was a faculty lecturer.

April 2024

Catherine Nguyen joined the lab as a research assistant and Christina Roca joined as a graduate student. Welcome!

April 2024

Helen presented as a part of the Symposia: Cross-Species Analysis of the Autism Risk Gene, CHD8: Translating Insights From Diverse Animal Systems to Inform Human Studies.

March 2024

Elina, Kate and James presented posters at the MPA Conference in Kona, Hawaii.

March 2024

Helen gave a talk at the Bay Area Autism Consortium research symposium.

March 2024

The Willsey lab is hiring a Staff Research Associate to join our team. You can read about the position and apply here.

February 2024

Helen, Elina and James traveled to Orlando, FL to attend the SYNGAP1 conference where Helen gave a talk.

December 2023

Two new preprints from the lab—one from first author Nawei Sun and a second from first author Belinda Wang. You can check them out here and here.

December 2023

Congratulations to Elina on her poster prize at the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology retreat!

November 2023

James Schmidt recently graduated from Pomona College with a BA in Neuroscience and joined the lab as a research assistant.

September 2023

Helen, Elina and Kate traveled to Maryland to attend the 19th International Xenopus conference. Helen gave a keynote talk and Kate and Elina presented posters.

August 2023

The lab celebrated Micaela’s first-author paper and cover image, and wished Sam well as he departs for Altos Labs.

August 2023

Christina Roca, IMSD Fellow, completed her summer rotation in the Willsey lab.

August 2023

Two summer students, Katie and Lily, volunteered in lab under Kate's mentorship.

July 2023

Micaela Lasser, PhD is first author of new paper, Pleiotropy of autism-associated chromatin regulators, published in the July issue of Development. Her image was selected for the cover.

July 2023

DSCB graduate student, Elina Kostyanovskaya, officially joins the lab after a productive rotation. Welcome, Elina!

April 2023

Rotation student Elina attended the Cell & Developmental Biology of Xenopus: Gene Discovery & Disease course where grad student Kate was a TA and Helen was a faculty lecturer.

April 2023

We are hiring a Staff Research Associate. Learn about the position and apply here.

April 2023

Welcome Elina Kostyanovskaya (DSCB), Chris He (DSCB), Marci Iadarola (Neuroscience), Nilla Sivakumar (Neuroscience), and Andoni Asencor (Neuroscience)!!

April 2023

A warm welcome to the newest pseudotetraploid lab members

March 2023

The Transmitter published an article about Micaela’s microtubule paper.

February 2023

Helen gave a talk at the GRC Cilia, Mucus and Mucociliary Interactions conference in Italy.

February 2023

Rotation student Elina won a competitive scholarship to attend the Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor Labs.

February 2023

Read the article about cilia’s link to autism here.

January 2023

Helen was listed as one of the 40 young researchers who are working on autism-related science across the globe. Find the full list here.

December 2022

The Joan and Sanford I. Weill Neurosciences Building establishes a welcoming new home for patients, researchers and clinicians at UCSF's Mission Bay campus. The six-floor, 282,500-square-foot building houses clinics and research centers, as well as laboratory, engineering and computational research space.

January 2023

Pleiotropy of autism-associated chromatin regulators

Read the preprint here

December 2022

Read Helen’s profile here.

How Helen Willsey broke new ground, frogs in hand

November 2022

Graduate Student Kate McCluskey traveled to Saint-Malo France to present her work at the DYRK1A Conference.

November 2022

Erich Martinez (UC Berkeley Undergraduate) joins the lab!

October 2022

Spectrum published an article highlighting our work and the problem of pleiotropy in autism functional genetics.

August 2022

We were awarded an early-career investigator grant from Coalition to Cure CHD2 to support our work studying the role of CHD2 in brain development using Xenopus and human cells.

August 2022

Summer SRTP student Maya Lines won a best talk award describing her research on the response of microglia to ASD risk gene perturbations in Xenopus.

August 2022

2 Undergraduates and 3 High School students join the lab for the summer.

June 2022

Helen was awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator award to support our work using Xenopus to identify psychiatric disorder-specific mechanisms of risk and resilience.

March 2022

Helen Willsey wins the John Gurdon Outstanding Speaker Prize at the 2021 International Xenopus meeting.

August 2021

Helen’s work highlighted by The Transmitter. Read it here.

September 2021

Graduate Student Kate McCluskey wins a poster prize at the 2021 International Xenopus meeting for her work on the development of the ENS.

August 2021