Spencer Lab location and information

The Spencer lab is located in room 613H on the 6th floor of the Southwest Tower in the Wash U/Barnes-Jewish Hospital Medical Campus in St. Louis, Missouri.

We have 900 square feet of lab space with a dedicated tissue culture room and an equipment bay with an Agilent Tapestation, Covaris ultrafocused sonicator, three thermocyclers/thermomixers, protein and nucleic acid electrophoresis equipment, and multiple centrifuges. Within steps from the lab there are shared qPCR machines, imagers, plate readers, automated protein analyzers, and Neon and Lonza electroporation instruments. We are also located one floor below the Siteman flow cytometry core, with analyzers, sorters, and Incucyte live cell monitoring instruments. Most computing is done on a dedicated 128 core compute cluster with 1.5Tb of total memory. We also have access to two DRAGEN FPGA servers for hardware-accelerated genomic analysis.

Principal Investigator

David H. Spencer MD, PhD (view bio)

Principal Investigator, chief troubleshooter and data wrangler

  • Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Immunology
  • Medical Director, McDonnell Genome Institute Clinical Sequencing Lab

Current lab members

Heidi Struthers

Lab Manager, deputy troubleshooter and chief lab safety officer

Mohamed Mohamed (Maghoub) MD, PhD

Post-doc/Staff Scientist, CUT&Run expert and Nextflow evangelist

  • Medicine in Sudan
  • PhD in Japan
  • Post-doc at the NIH studying meiosis in mice

Emilee Kotnik

Post-doc, MGG Alum

  • BS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
  • PhD in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO

Feiyu Du

CLIA Bioinformatics scientist, Genomics expert

  • BS in Biology and MS in Microbiology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
  • MS in Food Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO

Nidhi Davarapalli

Bioinformatic scientist, Nextflow guru

  • BS in Bioengineering, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL

Alumni

Reza Ghasemi, PhD

Former postoc and staff scientist
Now a laboratory genetics and genomics trainee at Wash U

Ben Ozenberger

Spencer lab’s first hire
Now a Genetics Grad student at U of Utah

Reuben Hogan

Wash U Undergraduate MARC Scholar
Now a MSTP at UCSF

Henry Wong

MS&T Master’s student, summer intern
Now at Sandia National Laboratories

Alex Miller

Bioinformatics Research Assistant, Texan

Ellie Wilson

Graduate of the Wash U MGG PhD program!
Clinical scientist at Pairidex, Inc, St. Louis MO