Tess Branon

Chemist by training and biologist by trade, Tess is interested in understanding the mechanisms of biological interactions at the molecular, cellular, and organismal level. Daughter of Mexican and Korean immigrants, Tess is a North Carolina native who received her undergraduate degrees from Western Carolina University. She then went on to work with Professor Alice Ting at MIT and Stanford University for her PhD where she engineered new proximity labeling tools such as TurboID for proteomic mapping, and worked collaboratively with hundreds of scientists to apply her novel technologies in living cells and organisms. Tess then went on to work with Professor Gregory Barton at the University of California, Berkeley for her postdoctoral training as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Robert Black Fellow where she studied host-microbiome interactions in the gut. Outside of the lab, Tess enjoys organizing for social justice reforms by day and dinner parties with friends by night.