Derek is the co-founder and President of The Wet Lab and organizes its monthly Open Bioinformatics Study Group. He has been working with startup companies since 2023, and hopes to build San Diego its first dedicated community space for bio-hacking. Derek is a co-organizer for the San Diego Python Users Group and the San Diego Open Bioinformatics Group (in partnership with the Wet Lab). He is an advocate for open source software and the democratization of scientific research.
Callen Hyland, Ph. D.
Callen is a co-founder and board member of The Wet Lab, and organizes our hands-on biotech workshops. She is also the Lead researcher on the La Jolla Cove Microbial Diversity Project, and hopes to encourage the public to make scientific discovery a part of everyday life. Callen has a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology, from Yale University, where she studied the biomechanics of neuronal regeneration. As a post-doctoral fellow at University of Californica, San Diego, she studied Hydra regeneration. She currently works as a life science consultant.
Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald, Ph. D.
Indrani is a co-founder and vice-President of The Wet Lab.She is a Neurogeneticist, and supporter of egalitarian and independent scientific pursuit. Indranis graduate work was conducted in the laboratories of Dr.s Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt, at North Carolina State University, and involved the quantitative and molecular characterization of a unique behavioural gene found in both males and females, but differentially processed to produce male-specific and female-specific behavioural outputs. Subsequently as a Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology, at the California think-tank, The Neurosciences Institute (founded by Nobel prize winner, Dr. Gerald Edelman), she worked on the molecular and behavioural genetics of sleep and memory, establishing a model for the rapid identification of genes involved in sleep-dependent memory formation. Indrani teaches Genetics, Behavioral Genetics, and Biological Psychology at the University of San Diego, and loves anything related to genes, the brain, behavior, evolutionary processes, experimental design, theatre, art, dance and literature.
Daren Le
Daren is the secretary at the Wet Lab. He graduated with B.S. in Molecular Cell & Developmental Biology at University of California Santa Cruz. He currently has two years of experience working in the biotech industry. He has worked at a company where he has synthesized oligonucleotides using solid phase synthesis and is currently working at a biotech company doing DNA extractions.
David Forney, Ph. D.
David leads two Research Projects at the Wet Lab: Salton Sea Bird Ecology, and Data Science for Democracy. In addition to those projects, David leads the curation of Wet Labs website, brand, and business model and is also the former Wet Lab outreach coordinator.
David completed his doctoral work at MIT, where he studied the carbon cycle and respiration kinetics of microbial communities in soils and marine sediment. He has 4 years of experience as a data scientist at a San Diego tech company. He is working with the wet lab in order to create a novel platform to create, share, and collaborate on new ideas, and promote pragmatic, critical scientific discussion.
Board of Directors
Prof. Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald, PhD
Vladimir Gainuillin, PhD
Callen Hyland, PhD
Daren Le
Derek Schaeffer