A fourth-year graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. She has B.S. in Plant Science with a concentration in plant pathology from Cornell University. Her main research interest is plant response to biotic and abiotic stresses. She currently works on elucidating the role of Target of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase and Inositol Polyphosphate (IP) signaling in mediating cell growth and phosphate metabolism in C. reinhardtii.

B.S. Botany, the University of Tokyo, Japan Ph.D. Evolutionary Biology, the University of Tokyo, Japan

Takashi plays a major role in identifying the regulatory mechanisms underlying the sexual life cycle progression in volvocine green algae. He has been working on genomics and evolutionary biology of this diverse lineage for 18 years between Japan and the United States, having identified mating type/sex determining regions (loci), cis-regulatory elements concerning zygote maturation, or a conserved "core" switching mechanism with sex determination in the lineage.

Dianyi has been working at the Umen lab since 2012 primarily working on cell size control. Dianyi enjoys reading memoirs and running outdoors. 

Peipei earned her PH.D in Genetics from Ocean University of China. She joined the lab in January 2020. Her research primarily centers on investigating the function of genes encoding conserved unannotated proteins in the model green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with some follow-up work using the model plants Arabidopsis thaliana and Setaria viridis.

Chris joined the lab in 2022 after earning his undergraduate degree at Missouri Baptist University. He attempts to mate Volvox carteri while maintaining the Umen lab Volvox collection.

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Kayleigh is an undergraduate student at Washington University.