The Team
Our team is made up of passionate scientists with diverse backgrounds and expertise, from cell biology to bioengineering. We believe that collaboration and teamwork is essential to making breakthroughs in stem cell research, and we work closely together to support each other's projects and share our knowledge and ideas.
Thank you for visiting our team page, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about our work.
Center Director
Kitai Kim, Ph.D.
Kitai Kim is the Director of the Human Stem Cell and Genome Engineering Center at UCLA. He earned his PhD in Virology/Oncology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed postdoctoral training in the Hematology/Oncology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He previously served as a faculty member at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), affiliated with Weill Medical College of Cornell University, before relocating his lab to UCLA in 2021.
His research focuses on advancing cellular therapies, automating stem cell technologies, and developing high-throughput gene editing platforms.
Center Manager
Lead Research Associate on
Genome Engineering
Deniz Ata, Ph.D.
Deniz received his BSc in Biology from the Istanbul University. Deniz obtained his PhD from the Koç University in the lab of Dr. Tamer Onder. His PhD work focused on disease modelling of neurodegenerative diseases using patient derived iPSCs and iMNs.
Deniz joined the team in 2022 as one of the founding members to manage genome engineering activities of the Center.
Center Manager
Lead Research Associate on
Stem Cell Biology
Hyokyeong Cha, Ph.D.
HyoKyeong earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Korea University, specializing in neurodegenerative diseases and mood disorders using mouse models and human iPSCs. She then worked on protein panels resistant to chemotherapy in breast cancer using proteomics and bioinformatics at Seoul National University Hospital.
Currently, her research focuses on leveraging large-scale data, stem cell, and genome engineering technologies to advance the understanding and clinical application of human diseases.
Researcher - Genome Engineering
Jong-Jin "James" Kim, MSc
James received his BS in Microbiology & Molecular biology from CNU. Jong-Jin Kim studied in the laboratory of Dr. Mi-Young Son at the University of Science and Technology and received an MS.
His research focuses on the application of human intestinal organoids derived from hESC and iPSC, the homeostasis mechanism of human intestinal stem cells, and the microbiome using human intestinal organoids.
Researcher - Stem Cell Biology
Hayley Fernandes, MSc
Hayley received her BSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Aberdeen. She then received her MSc in Stem Cell Engineering for Regenerative Medicine from the University of Glasgow where she studied under Dr. Ana Da Silva Costa, focusing on different differentiation protocols from human induced pluripotent stem cells to cardiomyocytes and how their maturation status was affected.
ARPH - Automated Research Platform at HSCGEC
Thermo Fisher
Opentrons Workcell
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