Wyatt Morgan
Wyatt Morgan

Hi, I'm Wyatt.

I think a lot about science. Occasionally I transcribe it.


Young Wyatt catching butterflies

I want to understand cool things. As a kid, I caught butterflies and studied them. In middle school, I kindled blinding magnesium sparklers, exploded a test tube (lodging a 5-mm glass shard in my palm), and nearly burned down our apartment by discarding pure zinc in the trash.

Curiosity led me to molecular biology at the Bronx High School of Science, where I interned in Dr. Ari Melnick’s lab at Weill Cornell (now at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona). In the Melnick lab I tested novel CRISPR systems and designed gRNA arrays to avoid lentiviral recombination for simultaneous targeting of multiple loci with Dr. Johannes Hellmuth (now a physician-scientist at LMU Munich) and Dr. Coraline Mlynarczyk (her lab at Yale studies cancers that arise from germinal centers).

COVID converted my first year of college into Zoom University, so I worked in industry while restricted from academic research in person. I interned at Minovia Therapeutics under Dr. Yehuda Brody, then joined Gordian Biotechnology to help develop pooled AAV screening in large living animal models that recapitulate diseases of aging (think senile racehorses for osteoarthritis or NHPs for fatty liver disease), graduating Stanford in two years to focus full time on work.

Nearly three years after joining Gordian and following my scientist thesis on improving signal in pooled screens, I co-founded Oncko (n-choose-k within oncology) to develop minimally cross-resistant drug combinations to cure cancer patients with typically less than twenty four months of overall survival. At Oncko, I helped build a platform to screen clinically efficacious molecules against combinations of cancer-relevant genetic perturbations at massive scale. I’m now back at Gordian for a focused stretch, before plans to return to academia.

This site is where I write up things I think are cool or useful. If you find mistakes in my writing or atrocious web design, please tell me!

Currently thinking about


Latest Review

Lentivirus

March 2026 · Review · ~35 min read

How HIV-1 was domesticated into a gene delivery vector, and why reverse transcription generates recombination in pooled screens: template switching during minus-strand elongation, intra-molecular repeat deletion, and the design rules that follow.


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