The team

Matteo received his PhD from the Cardio-Pulmonary Institute (Germany), studying immune functions of the endothelium in atherosclerosis. He now investigates how GWAS-identified variants contribute to atherosclerotic disease.

Ramen received his PhD in Biochemistry from Calcutta University and trained at the University of Chicago and USC in fatty-acid biochemistry and transgenic/knockout mouse development. At Stanford since 1999, he has generated numerous gene-targeted mouse models and contributed to more than 35 publications.

Daniel trained at UC San Diego, the NIH and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, where he studied diet, microbiome and cardiovascular disease as a Sarnoff Fellow. After internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at Stanford, he completed his postdoctoral work in the Quertermous Lab. He combines single-cell CRISPR perturbation in vitro with transgenic mouse models to identify smooth muscle cell regulators of coronary artery disease.

João earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh studying endothelial non-coding RNA in vascular remodelling, and continued there as a British Heart Foundation–funded postdoc. He joined the lab in 2022 as a postdoctoral fellow and is now an Instructor in Cardiovascular Medicine, studying how noncoding risk variants interact with activator and repressor proteins to shape transcription in vascular cells.

Trieu received her BS in biology from UC San Diego. She has extensive experience with human induced pluripotent stem cells and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, and is an expert in human coronary artery smooth muscle cell models used to study the role of transcription factors in coronary artery disease.

Chong is a cell and molecular biologist with deep expertise in genome engineering and CRISPR-based high-throughput screening. Before joining Stanford in 2017 she managed the IGI CRISPR Screening Core, the ES Cell Targeting Core and the Keck miRNA Knockout Mouse Project at UCSF. She leads large-scale CRISPRi screening, Perturb-seq and ATAC-seq projects to identify causal variants, genes and pathways at CAD and cardiometabolic GWAS loci.

Yunyun received her PhD in Genetics from Zhejiang University (2025), studying metabolic–epigenetic mechanisms of atherosclerosis and angiogenesis, and joined the lab in 2026. She uses Perturb-seq to uncover mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis.

Matt earned his PhD with Helle Jørgensen at the University of Cambridge, studying the clonal contribution of vascular smooth muscle cells to cardiovascular disease. Supported by the Stanford CVI T32 program, he studies SMC-derived chondromyocytes — bone-like cells in plaque that selectively express many CAD risk genes — using histology, functional assays and single-cell genomics.

Quanyi is a genomic and genetic scientist who received his BS in Biology and PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Wuhan University. He completed postdoctoral training at the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute and in the Quertermous Lab. His work spans TCF21 molecular QTLs, the human arterial cell atlas and integrative analysis of CAD genetics with single-cell data.