Lab Members

Fumi earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Tokyo and then moved to the United States to pursue his PhD at the University of Southern California (USC) where he started his work on the virus restriction factor APOBEC family proteins. He conducted his postdoctoral research jointly in Hong Zhou lab at UCLA and Xiaojiang Chen lab at USC, where he developed skills in cryo-electron microscopy. He joined Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in September 2025 and started an independent research group. 

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Anna earned her BS in Medicinal Chemistry from Moscow State University and a Ph.D. in Structural Biology from the University of Southern California, where she studied G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) using lipidic cubic phase crystallography with synchrotron and XFEL sources. As a membrane protein crystallographer, she has studied GPCR–ligand complexes of MT1, CysLT2, V1b, CRTH2, and A2A. During her postdoctoral training with Tamir Gonen at UCLA, she contributed to adapting micro-electron diffraction (MicroED) for membrane proteins, and in Patrick O’Neill’s lab, she worked on developing genetically-encoded photocontrolled GPCR tools for neuroscience. Her research addresses fundamental questions of how molecular structure translates into biological function. 

ORCID link

Originally from Southeastern Connecticut, Theo is a PhD student in the 2025 Driskill Graduate Program (DGP) cohort. He graduated with a BS in Biochemistry from Simmons University in 2025, having worked on fruit fly behavior in the Johnson Lab since 2021. His primary research interests in the Ito Lab center on how HIV accessory proteins interact with host factors to contribute to pathogenesis. Outside of the lab, Theo enjoys playing basketball as well as cooking for friends and family.