- Undergraduates Leo Kadota, Audrey Lee and Julia Leung won a team UTRA award from Brown for summer 2015 research on Sciara DNA puff amplification. They will continue their research in academic year 2015/2016 as part of their senior Honor’s theses.
- Congratulations to graduate student John Urban on his invited platform talk about mapping replication origins in the human genome at the September 2015 Cold Spring Harbor meeting on Eukaryotic DNA Replication and Genome Maintenance. This comes on the heels of many of John’s achievements including his funding as an NIH trainee, receipt of the prestigious NSF individual predoctoral fellowship award, and receipt of NSF EPSCoR funding. John married fellow graduate student Jen Johnson two days before the Cold Spring Harbor replication meeting. (video link)
- Senior research associate Yutaka Yamamoto had his research featured in an invited platform talk at the 13th annual Discovery on Target Meeting — Symposium: “Developing CRISPR-based Therapies” in fall, 2015 (Boston, MA). Yutaka has developed a method of site-specific insertion of large pieces of DNA into an intact organism using the cell’s preferred pathway of non-homologous end-joining. He used this method for transformation of the fly Sciara, but it could be used in a wide variety of organisms, including those where transformation methods are not already available.
- Susan Gerbi was a member of the site visit team that reviewed the student training programs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2014 (OITE: Office Intramural Training and Education) and the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA) in 2015. She will serve as a member of the NSF grant review panel on Mechanisms of Inheritance in March, 2016.