Bondy-Denomy Lab Members

Joe is an Associate Professor at UCSF, in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology. Joe went to the University of Waterloo for his undergrad in Biology (Microbiology specialization) and spent time as a co-op student in labs at Western University (London, ON) and McGill University (Montreal, QC). Joe then attended the University of Toronto to complete his PhD in Alan Davidson’s Lab where he studied interactions between bacteriophages and the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, focusing on the effects of lysogeny and the CRISPR-Cas immune system. In 2015, Joe started the lab at UCSF as a Sandler Fellow and in November of 2017, became an Assistant Professor. In July of 2020, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Joe also become an investigator with the UCB Innovative Genomics Institute in 2019. Alongside all of the exciting scientific endeavors Joe is involved with in lab, he is also a scientific advisory board member of SNIPR Biome and Excision Biotherapeutics and is a scientific advisory board member and co-founder of Acrigen Biosciences. Joe also has a long-standing love of baseball, Canada, and first and foremost, his wife and two sons. As a PI and UCSF Faculty member, Joe has completed Gilliam Mentorship Training, UCSF DEI Champion Training, and the following UCSF workshops: Acknowledging and Negotiating the Mentor-Mentee Tensions Inherent in the Research Lab, Career Conversations, and Three Truths and Three Tries: Facing and Overcoming Critical Social Justice Challenges at the Micro, Mezzo, and Macro Levels. The UCSF Graduate Faculty Development Program has a handy Faculty Participation Tracker and a comprehensive list of all faculty trainings.

Adolfo Cuesta is an Infectious Disease Fellow who joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in July 2024. He completed undergraduate training at Haverford College and then worked with Dr. Dan Littman at NYU studying Th17 cell regulation. He then migrated to the west coast to start in the UCSF MSTP. In 2019, he completed a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology with Dr. Jack Taunton where he developed lysine-reactive aryl sulfonyl fluoride-based covalent inhibitors of Hsp90. He then completed his MD in 2021 and stayed at UCSF for Internal Medicine residency and Infectious Disease fellowship. He is excited about phage engineering and exploring the use of bacteriophage therapy to treat highly antibiotic resistant infections.

Deepto joined the Bondy-Denomy Lab in September 2021 as a post-doctoral scholar. Prior to his post-doctoral adventures, Deepto was a Ruth L Kirschstein (NRSA) Graduate student in Prof. Alanna Schepartz’s lab at Yale/ UC Berkeley. Driven by his fascination with phages, bacteria, and their ever-inspiring time-immemorial battle for survival (read: treasure-trove of biotechnological application waiting to happen!), Deepto hopped across the pond for his post-doc research. At UCSF, Deepto is working with the Bondy-Denomy and David Agard labs to study the molecular underpinnings of THE MOST potent anti-immune mechanism used by jumbo-phages to thwart bacterial defenses. In his spare time, Deepto loves to write, photograph birds, host barbecues, dabble in trivia, play basketball, solve puzzles/ the NYT daily crossword and bake.

Esther is a postdoctoral researcher who joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in September 2024. Originally from Israel, she completed her graduate studies at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) in the Ehud Banin Lab, focusing on prophage-host interactions. During her time at BIU, Esther developed a passion for unraveling the complex dynamics between bacteria and phages. In the Bondy-Denomy lab, she is excited to explore bacterial immune system mechanisms and their regulation. Outside of research, Esther is the proud mother of twin boys, balancing her work as a dedicated scientist and parent. She enjoys supporting women in science and cherishing time with her family.

Evelyn Keefer is a graduate student in the Tetrad program and joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in July 2026. Evelyn grew up near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received a degree in Biology from New York University, where she worked in the lab of Dr. Claude Desplan studying development of the Drosophila visual system. After undergrad, Evelyn worked as a technician in the lab of Dr. Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University studying molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythms in Drosophila. After deciding fruit flies were too big of an organism to work on, Evelyn joined the Bondy-Denomy lab, where she is studying antidefense mechanisms of the jumbophage ΦKZ. Outside of lab, Evelyn enjoys discovering new restaurants in the Bay Area, watching basketball, traveling, and hanging out with her two one-eyed Siberian cats, Odin and Pekoe.

“Harshu Musunuri is an MD-PhD student in the biophysics program and is focused on synthetic bacteriophage engineering. Harshu grew up in Seattle and studied a combination of chemistry and computer science at Stanford, where she graduated from in 2022 with honors. During her undergrad, she worked in Dr. Peter Kim’s lab at the ChEM-H Institute, designing universal vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza. She also spent summers at the Institute for Protein Design and at D.E. Shaw Research studying algorithms for protein design and molecular dynamics simulations. In the Bondy-Denomy lab, she will continue applying protein design to viruses (this time prokaryotic ones!) to enable generalizable retargeting of phage specificity, as well as custom payload delivery. She is excited to understand the molecular underpinnings of phage injection, and apply this towards new kinds of therapeutics for human disease. When she’s not at the bench or on her computer, Harshu loves to read, dance, bike around SF hills, and explore the outdoors.”

Jon is a postdoctoral scholar in the JBD lab interested in studying the novel organelles of the Pseudomonas jumbophage φKZ. Jon grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and earned his B.S. in Physics from Temple University. He then moved to UC Berkeley, where he completed his Ph.D. studying how tubulin post-translational modifications and microtubule-associated proteins regulate molecular motor activity. Jon is excited to bring his biochemistry and microscopy expertise to the lab to help uncover how φKZ protects its genome during infection. Outside the lab, Jon enjoys traveling, playing complicated board games, and reading long fantasy novels.

Kevin Kim is a physician-scientist and an Infectious Diseases fellow in the UCSF Research Track, and joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in August 2026. He grew up in Incheon, just outside Seoul, and studied chemistry at Yonsei University before two years of military service as a KATUSA, a Korean soldier attached to the US Army, where he served as a medic. He then headed to Princeton for a PhD in biochemistry with Drs. Bonnie Bassler and Howard Stone, working on quorum sensing and biofilm formation, and returned to Yonsei for medical school (same campus) with a detour into vasculitis research alongside Dr. Sang-Won Lee. After a year at Stanford with Dr. Paul Bollyky on phage–antibiotic combination therapy, he trained in internal medicine at Yale through the ABIM Physician-Scientist Pathway and came to UCSF in 2025. In the Bondy-Denomy lab, Kevin studies phage defense and anti-defense in Staphylococcus aureus, focusing on their jumbo phages, whose genomes swap thymine for uracil. Long term, he hopes to lead a lab developing phage therapy for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, S. aureus, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Outside the lab, Kevin is usually cooking, eating his way across the Bay Area, or chasing a better cup of coffee.

Miaoxi Liu is a Tetrad graduate student who joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in June 2024. Miaoxi grew up in Xi’an, the capital of thirteen dynasties of ancient China. She attended high school in Canada and pursued a bachelor’s degree in Immunology and Cell & Molecular Biology at the University of Toronto. During her undergraduate studies, she joined the Cowen Lab and used high-throughput screening methods to identify cell wall and cell wall organization genes of Candida albicans that are essential for cell growth. She also studied genes essential for Candida albicans pathogenic filamentation in anaerobic conditions. With an interest in immunology, she also worked in the Watts lab, studying the role of inflammatory monocytes in co-stimulating T cells during STING agonist immunotherapy. In the Bondy-Denomy lab, Miaoxi will continue studying immunology and host-pathogen interactions. She is excited to study new bacterial immune systems that could potentially target different families of phages. In her spare time, Miaoxi enjoys making crafts, drawing, and swimming.

“Michelle Grunberg is a Tetrad graduate student and joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in June 2024. She grew up in Los Angeles and graduated with a bachelors in biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2020. In undergrad, she studied a previously uncharacterized small open reading frame of the Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus in the lab of Dr. Carolina Arias and interned at UCSF and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Biohub, where she optimized metagenomic next-generation sequencing by harnessing CRISPR-Cas9 technology. After her bachelors, Michelle developed Cas13-based technologies to study viral and host RNA in the labs of Pardis Sabeti and Cameron Myhrvold at the Broad Institute and Princeton University. Later, she returned to the CZ Biohub, where she developed fluorescent reporters of viral infection in mammalian cell culture. As a graduate student in the Bondy-Denomy lab, she is excited to study novel phage inhibitors of nucleotide signaling immune systems such as Thoeris and CBASS. Outside of the lab, Michelle enjoys exploring the city, painting, reading, and getting out in nature.”

Wearn-Xin is a postdoc who joined the Bondy-Denomy lab in August 2023. Wearn-Xin grew up in the sunny island of Singapore and completed her graduate work in the Tang lab at the University of Oxford in the UK, where she finished her PhD with understanding movement of plasmids in Neisseria spp. After spending years deciding between researching on viruses or on bacteria, she has finally decided to do both. In the Bondy-Denomy lab, Wearn-Xin is working on understanding how conserved genes may inhibit phage replication in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In her free time, Wearn-Xin enjoys a good hike, exploring new food places and petting dogs that come her way.