Team

Dr. Robert Wolfe joins the lab after postdoctoral appointments at Michigan State University in the laboratories of Drs. James Geiger, Xuefei Huang, and Kelly Kim. He earned his Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from Michigan State University under the mentorship of Dr. David Weliky. His research integrates structural biology, protein engineering, and biophysical approaches to study virology and immunology, with expertise in cryo-EM, X-ray crystallography, protein design, and experimental method development. He is especially interested in the design and structural characterization of VLP-based vaccines and in understanding the molecular mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions. Outside the lab, Rob enjoys mead making, cooking, hiking, camping, weightlifting, mixed martial arts, and other outdoor activities.

Stefano is interested in uncovering the structural basis and mechanistic function of molecular machines through the integration of imaging, bioinformatics, and AI. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biology and Molecular Biology from the Università degli Studi di Parma, followed by a PhD in the Rivetti Lab (2014–2017), where he used Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to study nucleoprotein complexes, transcriptional regulation mechanisms and developed a correlative AFM-fluorescence microscopy pipeline to capture membrane remodeling induced by toxin-antitoxin systems. He then joined, as post-doc, the Jensen Lab, first at Caltech and subsequently at Brigham Young University (2021–2025), where he led cryo-ET research on bacterial molecular machines—including type IV pili, secretion systems, and flagellar motors—as well as structural studies of the yeast Ire1-alpha unfolded protein response pathway. His long-term goal is to leverage structural and computational approaches to understand the architecture and mechanics of molecular machines, with the aim of re-engineering them for translational applications.