Zev Armour-Garb

About

• From a suburb of Albany, New York, and currently live in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Got my bachelor's from the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry, where I spent much of my time in SF working under Alex Marson at the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology. He and Jennifer Doudna advised my Honors Thesis
• Also funded to pursue a master's at the University of Cambridge. I worked at the Centre for Misfolding Diseases. My supervisor, Tuomas P. J. Knowles, took a chance and let me play around with microfluidics until something worked
• Currently a first-year doctoral student in the Biophysics Graduate Program at Harvard Medical School. I'm still doing lab rotations, but plan to study brain–body circuits
• Interests: immunology, neurobiology, genomics, and their intersections; also weightlifting and poker

Research

• Knowles Lab (2024–2025): Digital droplet microfluidics for protein misfolding disease diagnostics (with Sara Linse). Pivoted into a new field for a year, and learned how to apply stat mech to biology. Lab social chair
• Marson Lab (2022–2024): Base-editing mutagenesis in primary human T cells; Treg engineering for combination immunotherapies (with Qizhi Tang). Had incredible mentors who helped me grow into an independent scientist. Led a therapeutics discovery campaign, now in preclinical trials
• Sheng Lab (2021): Cd2+-binding DNA nanosensors. Learned the basics of experimental science
• Forni Lab (2019): GnRH-1 neurons during development. Mostly watched and learned, and became intrigued by research

Papers

1. Aviad Levin#, Shenglin Cai#, Hannes Ausserwoeger#, Georg Meisl, Daoyuan Qian, Zev Armour-Garb, Vikramdeep Singh, Irina A. Edu, Gareth Jenkins, Rob Scrutton, Georg Krainer, Tomas Sneideris, Lin Chai, William E. Arter, Luis M. A. Oliveira, Tuomas P. J. Knowles*. Quantification of α-synuclein seed levels in native CSF from Parkinson’s disease subjects through digital amplification. Under Review
2. Alison Fanton, Liam J. Bartie, Juliana Q. Martins, Vincent Q. Tran, Laine Goudy, Courtney Kernick, Matthew G. Durrant, Jingyi Wei, Zev Armour-Garb, April Pawluk, Silvana Konermann, Alexander Marson, Luke A. Gilbert, Theodore L. Roth, Patrick D. Hsu*. Site-specific DNA insertion into the human genome with engineered recombinases. Nature Biotechnology, 2025 November 6. DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02895-3
3. Michele Mosconi*, Chiara Leonardi, Zev Armour-Garb, Beatrice Rocutto, Marten Beeg, Georg Meisl, Lei Ortigosa-Pascual, Luca Broggini, Mario Salmona, Stefano Ricagno, Tuomas P. J. Knowles, Luisa Diomede*. Tau catalyzes amyloid-β aggregation in a fold-dependent manner. bioRxiv, 2025 October 22. DOI: 10.1101/2025.10.21.683640
4. Ralf Schmidt#*, Carl Ward#*, Rama Dajani, Zev Armour-Garb, Mineto Ota, Vincent Allain, Rosmely Hernandez, Madeline Layeghi, Galen Xing, Laine Goudy, Dmytro Dorovskyi, Charlotte Wang, Yan Yi Chen, Chun Jimmie Ye, Brian R. Shy, Luke A. Gilbert, Justin Eyquem, Jonathan K. Pritchard, Stacie Dodgson, Alexander Marson*. Base-editing mutagenesis maps alleles to tune human T cell functions. Nature, 2023 December 13. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06835-6
5. Hehua Liu#, Yanqing Gao#, Johnsi Mathivanan#, Zev Armour-Garb, Zhiwei Shao, Yixi Zhang, Xin Zhao, Qiyuan Shao, Weizhen Zhang, Jie Yang, Chulei Cao, Huili Li, Jia Sheng*, Jianhua Gan*. Crystal structures and identification of novel Cd2+-specific DNA aptamer. Nucleic Acids Research, 2023 April 4. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkad239

# contributed equally · * corresponding author

Photos