Henry Brinkerhoff is the Lee Hood Systems Fellow at ISB, working with Nitin Baliga’s lab.

Henry obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Washington in Jens Gundlach’s nanopore biophysics lab, where he helped to accomplish foundational results in the development of nanopore sequencing. He also helped to create and pioneer the “nanopore tweezers” technique, in which nanopore sequencing-like experiments are used to make single-molecule measurements of enzyme kinetics with unprecedented resolution. He went on to complete a postdoc at TU Delft with Cees Dekker’s lab, where he adapted the principle of nanopore sequencing to obtain reads of single proteins, and further postdoctoral work back at the University of Washington where he continued that work and helped develop an approach to rapidly develop new sequencing platforms for non-canonical nucleic acid bases.

At ISB, Henry is working on creating new instruments and techniques to measure and study molecules of importance to systems biology, especially concerning the expression and modification of mRNA.