Meet the Team

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Semil Choksi, PhD, a scientist in Jeremy Reiter’s Lab at the CVRI, took this image, “Cilia in space,” as part of our October microscopy contest. This image shows a tracheal organoid derived from a single airway stem cell cultured in matrigel for several weeks.  A subset of tracheal cells generates hundreds of motile cilia (labeled in yellow), which point into the lumen of the organoid and beat in a coordinated manner.

The team uses a combination of single-cell RNA sequencing and CRISPR editing to identify novel regulators of multiciliated cell differentiation. Dr. Choksi and colleagues recently identified two novel opposing transcription factors that drive the airway stem cell to multiciliated cell fate transition (Byrnes, Deleon, Reiter & Choksi, bioRxiv, 2022).

Dr. Choksi describes being a part of our UCSF Stem Cell community: "I love interacting with a community of researchers thinking about stem cell biology and sharing ideas, tools and techniques.”