Ernst Heinz Pulido

Graduate Student

Rhiju Das, Stanford University

Pronouns: he/him

Originally from the Philippines, Ernst Pulido and his family moved to Pacifica, California when he was in middle school, and then to Ashburn, Virginia for high school. Following a 9-year gap after high school, Pulido returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and started at Diablo Valley Community College in Pleasant Hill, California, before eventually transferring to San Francisco State University (SFSU).

During his undergraduate studies, Pulido joined the PUMAS program at Gladstone Institutes in 2017, where he worked in the lab of Shomyseh Sanjabi studying CD8+ T cells, which are cells that are called upon to kill virus-infected cells. He returned to the PUMAS program the following year, working in collaboration with the lab of Nevan Krogan at Gladstone and David Agard at UC San Francisco to study the interaction between proteins to find new therapeutic targets.

After his time as an intern, Pulido joined the Krogan Lab as a research associate and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped study the interaction of SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins and human proteins. He contributed to three scientific papers, one published in Science in 2020 and two more published in Nature in 2022 and 2023.

Upon graduating with his bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from SFSU, Pulido received a NIH RISE Fellowship to continue his education as a Master’s student.

Pulido was the co-president of SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science) at SFSU. He also led multiple guest speaker programs, which brought graduate students to speak to students at SFSU through career panels and other workshops. Pulido regularly spoke to community college and high school students around the Bay Area to share his research experience and excite underrepresented minorities to work in science. For this work, Pulido received Gladstone’s Diversity Champion Award in 2022 for his commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion both within and outside Gladstone.

Pulido is now a PhD student in the Biophysics Program at Stanford Medicine, working as a rotational student in the labs of Naima G. Sharaf and Rhiju Das.