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• Seth
• Bio

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Seth Darst

Professor
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Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics

He is the one who knocks! And most likely to be late to your thesis defense.​

Seth is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and  the American Academy of Microbiology and National Academy of Sciences, in addition to being a recipient of the 2022 Aminoff prize in crystallography. He obtained a B.S. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering. After nine years of postgraduate education in Chemical Engineering, he finally realized he didn't want to be an engineer when he grows up, so he joined the laboratory of Roger Kornberg and tried to learn about transcription. After 35 years, he still hasn't figured it out. 

Fun fact: he's quite the distinguished classical pianist!​


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• Anoosha
• Bio

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Anoosha Banerjee

4th Year Graduate Fellow

​Most likely to become a food influencer.

​Anoosha graduated from Barnard College in 2020 with a degree in biochemistry. After working for two years as a research assistant, she decided to pursue her PhD and is a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Chemical Biology Program. During her time in the Darst-Campbell lab, Anoosha hopes to learn about the structural biology of hepatitis B virus (HBV) polymerase and gain mechanistic insight on its role in viral replication. In her free time, Anoosha loves to cook, go for long walks, and cuddle her two menacing cat children.  

• Joshua
• Bio

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Joshua Chandanani

5th year Graduate Fellow
He/Him/His 

Most likely to be wandering Queens in search of unpretentious foodie spots.

Joshua graduated from University College London (UCL) in 2021 with an integrated Master's degree in Biochemistry, and began his graduate studies at Rockefeller in the fall of 2021. He is working on the structural and biochemical mechanisms behind how foreign factors manipulate and exploit bacterial transcription machinery, with T4 phage and pRK2 (IncP-1 plasmids) as case studies in E. coli.
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• Wamiah
• Bio

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Wamiah Chowdhury

Postdoctoral Fellow

Most likely to order the spiciest food at a restaurant. 

Wamiah was born and raised in Bangladesh before moving to the US to attend Mount Holyoke College where she majored in Biochemistry. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied an iron-sulfur cluster containing transcription factor in E.coli in the lab of Dr. Tricia Kiley. She is excited to be moving back to the East Coast for her postdoc! During her free time, she enjoys experimenting with cooking and reading thriller/suspense books.  





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• Bob
• Bio

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Bob Landick

Guest Investigator

Most likely to get recruited by the NBA.

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• Andreas
• Bio

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Andreas Mueller

Research Associate

Most likely to survive on a deserted island and fight off a bear.




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Andreas conducted his undergraduate studies at the University of Stuttgart in Germany a concentration in biochemistry. He then moved to the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, for his PhD research on genes of unknown function associated with the bacterial proteasome, where he discovered the major transcriptional regulator of the DNA damage response in mycobacteria - a crucial stage during the early phase of tuberculosis infection. His interest in transcription piqued, leading to his current study in the dynamics and structural mechanisms of bacterial RNA polymerase.



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• Riley
• Bio

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Riley for translation  completed his PhD studying the features which drive the selection of mRNA
​at Columbia University in the lab of Professor Ruben L Gonzalez, Jr. He is excited to interrogate the competition between mRNA silencing, translation and decay in the Darst Lab

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• Yukti
• Bio

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Yukti Dhingra

Postdoctoral
Fellow

Most likely to open a restaurant one day.


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Yukti was born and raised in New Delhi, India. She earned her bachelor's degree in biotechnology from Delhi in 2018. She did her PhD in the Sashital Lab at Iowa State University. Her thesis work focused on understanding mechanisms of memory formation in CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems. She used cryo-EM and biochemistry to demonstrate how Cas4-Cas1-Cas2 complex achieves processing and integration of short DNA sequences into a CRISPR array. She is excited to integrate her interest in transcription from her undergraduate days with cryo-EM from graduate school for her postdoc in the Darst-Campbell lab. ​