Postdoctoral Fellow · Harvard Medical School

Josh Tycko

Josh Tycko

About

I'm a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, in Michael Greenberg's lab in the Department of Neurobiology and Martin Pollak's lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. On an NIH F99/K00 fellowship, I develop protein barcoding methods to measure the cellular targets of secreted proteins at scale.

I earned my Ph.D. in Genetics at Stanford with Michael Bassik and Lacra Bintu, on an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. There I built pooled screens that measure the functions of thousands of human protein domains, mapping transcriptional effectors and engineering compact tools to switch genes on and off.

At Stanford I was also a teaching assistant for a course on the science and bioethics of CRISPR, an instructor for a hands-on cell engineering lab, and a mentor to the iGEM team. As a BioFutures Fellow and co-leader of the Genetics Advocacy Committee, I worked with other trainees to study and improve graduate STEM training.

I also helped co-found Stylus Medicine, which is developing recombinase-based cell therapies for cancer.

Research

Interests

  1. Measure human protein function at scale

    I build pooled screens and other scalable synthetic-biology methods to read out the functions of many proteins and their gene-regulatory elements at once.

  2. Model how cells process information

    I use those measurements to work out how cells process information from molecular signals, including secreted proteins, and turn them into changes in cell state.

  3. Manipulate cells with new tools

    I turn what I learn into new tools, for example by engineering new proteins to write and regulate genetic programs. I focus on simplicity, specificity and deliverability, to make these tools safe and reliable enough to move towards becoming therapeutics.

Selected work

Publications

  1. 2024

    Development of compact transcriptional effectors using high-throughput measurements in diverse contexts

    Tycko J*, Van MV*, Aradhana, DelRosso N, … Bintu L, Bassik MC. Nature Biotechnology

    DOI PDF Feature
  2. 2024

    Multicenter integrated analysis of noncoding CRISPRi screens

    Yao D*, Tycko J*#, Oh JW*, … Bassik MC, Reilly SK#. Nature Methods

    * Co-first authors can be reported in any order

    DOI PDF
  3. 2022

    Systematic discovery of recombinases for efficient integration of large DNA sequences into the human genome

    Durrant MG*, Fanton A*, Tycko J*, … Bhatt AS, Hsu PD. Nature Biotechnology

    * Co-first authors listed alphabetically

    DOI PDF News & Views
  4. 2020

    High-throughput discovery and characterization of human transcriptional effectors

    Tycko J, DelRosso N, Hess GT, … Bassik MC, Bintu L. Cell

    DOI PDF preLights
  5. 2019

    Mitigation of off-target toxicity in CRISPR-Cas9 screens for essential non-coding elements

    Tycko J*, Wainberg M*, Marinov GK*, … Kundaje A, Bassik MC. Nature Communications

    DOI PDF

All publications →