Biography

Colin Comerci received his PhD in Biophysics from Stanford University in 2019, where he worked in the laboratory of W. E. Moerner. While at Stanford, he explored how nanoscale structures lead to biological function. To this end, he built a STimulated Emission Depletion (STED) superresolution microscope and combined it with quantitative image analysis to study nanoscale structures in a variety of biological systems. This includes features of the primary cilium, chromatin-organizing proteins, immune receptors in human cancer tissue, and surface layers from bacteria.

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After graduate school, Colin became interested in how molecular processes affect larger biological systems. As a postdoc in Gürol Süel's lab at UCSD, he applied techniques from systems biology first to understand how electrochemical signals modify bacterial biofilm growth, and then to examine how bacterial spores use enantiomer signaling to sense and avoid competition with nearby bacterial species.