John Vaughen, Ph.D.

John Vaughen is a Sandler Faculty Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He began his lab at UCSF in 2024 after completing his Ph.D. under the tutelage of Tom Clandinin at Stanford University.

Vaughen’s primary research interest is lipids, amphiphilic macromolecules that organize biochemical reactions within organelles, endow membranes with unique identities and biophysical properties and dynamically signal between and within cells. While we are unearthing a large combinatorial diversity of lipids in the brain, it is unclear how lipids maintain the structure and function of postmitotic neurons for life. During his doctoral studies, Vaughen identified novel functions for a rarer class of lipids, sphingolipids, in directly programming the daily circadian remodeling of neurites in a key sleep circuit, a diurnal feat achieved by metabolic coupling of lysosomal lipid catabolism in glia with lipid biosynthesis in circadian neurons. His ongoing work is identifying the enzymes and signaling cascades that generate cell-type-specific brain lipidomes, determining why and how such cellular lipotypes​ support specialized subcellular compartments such as synaptic vesicles, testing how aging and sleep both regulate, and are regulated by, the brain lipidome, and developing genetic and mass-spectrometry tools to better quantitate and manipulate lipids in the brain.

• How does sleep sustain lipid function across adult life?
• Protein and Lipid Homeostasis in the Aging Brain