Asa Kalish

I’m Asa Kalish, a 4th year PhD candidate in UCSF’s Biophysics program, under Professor Zev Gartner. My thesis is focused on applying statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to understand how cellular mechanics and dynamics drive the self-organization of tissues. We test our models with primary human mammary organoids, combining genetic and pharmacological perturbations with high-throughput quantitative imaging experiments [1].

Before the Gartner Lab, I spent a year at UCSF with Professor Wallace Marshall as a junior specialist, where I studied fluctuations in the geometry of flagella in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and built Markov models of single-cell habituation in Stentor [2].

I did my undergraduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, with majors in Physics and Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science. After a short time in a condensed matter physics lab, I spent the next three years investigating organelle size control in Saccharomyces Cerevisiae [3].