James K Nunez,

Dr. James Nuñez is an Assistant Professor in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. He earned his B.S. in Biology from the University of Colorado, Denver while conducting research with Tatiana Kutateladze and Catherine Musselman on epigenetic reader proteins. He received his Ph.D. in 2016 from Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley, where he determined the molecular mechanism of foreign DNA capture by the Cas1-Cas2 integrase complex during CRISPR–Cas immunity in bacteria. He was awarded a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation and a Harold Weintraub Award from the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center for his PhD research. Dr. Nuñez continued his training as a HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow in Jonathan Weissman’s lab at UCSF, where he developed genome-wide CRISPRoff/on epigenome editing technologies for programming transcriptional memory in human cells. Dr. Nunez began his faculty position at UC Berkeley in Fall 2021, where his lab is combining functional genomics, CRISPR-based gene and epigenome editing technologies to dissect the mechanisms underlying epigenetic memory in mammalian cells, while continuing to engineer next generation CRISPR-based technologies for perturbing the human epigenome.