Jared Toettcher

Asst.Professor
Chemical and Biological Engineering
Princeton University
United States of America

Biography

Jared Toettcher is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. Originally from California, he graduated with a B.S. in Bioengineering from UC Berkeley in 2004. He completed his graduate studies at MIT in Biological Engineering in 2009, working with Bruce Tidor (MIT) and Galit Lahav (Harvard Medical School) on the relationship between mammalian cells’ surveillance of DNA damage and decision to undergo cell cycle arrest. Dr. Toettcher then completed a Cancer Research Institute postdoctoral fellowship under Wendell Lim and Orion Weiner at UC San Francisco, where he developed new tools to control mammalian cell behavior by engineering optogenetic inputs to the signaling pathways controlled by Ras and PI 3-kinase. Dr. Toettcher’s research focuses on dissecting how signaling pathways work together to orchestrate complex cell decision-making. Currently, his work focuses on how Ras and PI3K activity are coordinated in cell fate control, and how signal processing is disregulated in cancer cells harboring mutations in these pathways. Dr. Toettcher’s honors and awards include a Cancer Research Institute fellowship, NIH Ruth Kirschstein postdoctoral fellowship, an MIT Presidential Fellowship and a UC Berkeley Regents’ Scholarship.

Research Intrest

Bioengineering

List of Publications
Toettcher JE, Voigt CA, Weiner OD, Lim WA., 2011, The promise of optogenetics in cell biology: interrogating molecular circuits in space and time, J Nat Methods, 1, 35-38
Toettcher JE, Gong D, Lim WA, Weiner OD,2011, Light-based feedback for controlling intracellular signaling dynamics,J Nat Methods, 8, 837-839
Toettcher JE, Weiner OD, Lim WA., 2013, Using optogenetics to interrogate the dynamic control of signal transmission by the Ras/Erk module, JC, 155, 1422-34