Principal Investigator
Spencer Diamond has always been a man of the microbes. He received his B.S in Microbial Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, and received his Ph. D. in Biology w/ emphasis in microbiology from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. He returned to the University of California, Berkeley where he served as a postdoctoral researcher and subsequently project scientist in the laboratory of Prof. Jillian F. Banfield, applying genome resolved metagenomic methods to understand the biogeochemical functions encoded in soil microbial communities. Also, during his time in the Banfield Lab, Spencer worked together with researchers in Jennifer Doudna’s laboratory to co-develop a generalized strategy for targeted genome editing within microbial communities. Spencer is now a principal investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) where he leads a group focused on in vitro microbiome cultivation and modeling…he also enjoys a good BBQ.
Spencer DiamondPh.D.
- Microbial Modeling
- Metagenomics
Postdoctoral Researcher
Rebecca joined the Diamond Lab in January 2024 after obtaining her Ph.D. in Biology from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where she applied metagenomic and paleogenetic techniques to investigate microbial communities and anthropogenic drivers in Canadian lakes. In the Diamond Lab, Rebecca is working to characterize plasmid diversity, replication machinery, and host associations in the cow rumen, with the goal to identify vectors that will enable in situ microbiome engineering.
Rebecca GarnerPh.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Carlos, originally from Mexico, completed his Ph.D. in Spain at the Centre of Applied Biology and Edaphology from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he investigated the gut microbiome metabolism of food bioactive compounds, such as flavonoids and stilbenes, and the interindividual variability in the derived microbial metabolites and their health effects. As part of the Diamond Lab, Carlos is involved in the in vitro cultivation of gut microbial communities, using metagenomics and bioinformatics for their characterization and analysis. He is interested in leveraging these communities as model systems to study inflammation, with a focus on infants with asthmatic disease. Outside the lab, Carlos enjoys spicy food, traveling, live music events, and training.
Carlos
Iglesias-AguirrePh.D.
Lab Manager
Leylen joined the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) in July 2023 as the Diamond Lab Operations Manager, also as part of Banfield, Pett-Ridge, and Sachdeva labs. She holds a Master of Science in Biotechnology and an MBA, along with prior experience in biotech startups and pharma. Leylen oversees the business, HR and operational aspects of the Diamond Lab, integrating project management practices with the lab's scientific operations to boost efficiency and support the team's research goals. She also coordinates microbiome lab operations across IGI's BIOME / TED Audacious initiative, partnering with lab managers from the other labs to build and align workflows and priorities across the multi-lab project.
Leylen MiloslavichM.S., MBA
Staff Research Associate
Emma received a B.A. in History of Science and a minor in Integrative Biology from Harvard University in 2023. Emma works primarily on the rumen microbiome projects, doing DNA/RNA extractions, preparing media, cultivating colonies and in vitro communities inside the anaerobic chambers, and cleaning and analyzing 16S data. Alongside Nick, Emma also works on the experimental design and automation of the culturomics robot, including overseeing the downstream strain collection and validation pipeline. When not in lab, Emma can be found doing jigsaw puzzles, singing choral music, and taking photos of insects.
Emma MacKenzie
Automation Engineer
Nick Guerette holds a B.S. in Engineering and Computer Science from Swarthmore College. As the Diamond Lab’s Automation Engineer supporting the B.I.O.M.E. initiative, he maintains the group’s automated colony picking and nucleic acid extraction systems and manages a variety of equipment operations and planning tasks. Before joining the Diamond Lab in 2024, Nick served as Assistant Building Manager at the Innovative Genomics Institute and previously worked at the Berkeley Free Clinic as Facilities Operations Lead. He was also the Founder and Lead Engineer of a project providing clean water to Berkeley’s unhoused community members. Nick has over a decade of experience as a software engineer.
Nick Guerette
ML/Computational Biology Platform Engineer
Aziz brings six years of industry software engineering experience to the team, including 3.5 years at Color Health, where he developed LIMS and downstream reporting infrastructure to support product lines and workflows in COVID and cancer. As an undergraduate, he also gained bench experience working on CRISPR/Cas9 editing in tomato and tobacco. His current work focuses on building scalable pipelines and applying machine learning to metagenomic analysis across diverse environments.
Aziz Kamoun
Lab Assistant
Tasha earned her B.A. in General Biology with a focus on Plant Biology from UC Santa Cruz in 2010 and later completed an M.S. in Plant Ecophysiology at San Francisco State University in 2020. She gained experience working with the East Bay Regional Parks and the U.S. Forest Service and went on to lead the gDNA extraction pipeline at Pivot Bio, where she managed extractions from field, greenhouse, and chamber experiments while troubleshooting Biomek robotics. At the Diamond Lab, Tasha supports daily lab operations and contributes to the TED Audacious project through project planning and wet lab research focused on building a big strain repository using a culturomics robot.
Tasha Kayatsky
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Roisin is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley pursuing a B.S. in Nutrition and Metabolic Biology. As a research assistant in the Diamond Lab, she is investigating the role of the infant gut microbiome on inflammatory disease development using in vitro model systems. Outside the lab, Roisin enjoys running, playing tennis, reading, learning Spanish and French, and exploring new cities .
Roisin Scallon
Graduate Student- Affiliate
Fanding Zhou is a PhD candidate in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley, supervised by Prof. Yun S. Song. She works on computational methods for single-cell genomics and microbiome data, with a focus on statistical modeling and deep learning for high-dimensional biological systems. .
Fanding Zhou
Lab
Alumni
Pengfan Zhang
Postdoctoral Researcher
Jackie Zorz
Postdoctoral Collaborator
Andreja Kust
Postdoctoral Collaborator