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Faculty News
Michael Levin has
received a two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health’s
Mental Health Institute for a research project on “Automated
Analysis of Learning and Memory for Neuro-Development Studies.” The
goals are to create a next-generation, fully automated,
parallelized, real-time machine vision and environmental control
system to enhance the study of brain function and to enable
nootropic drug screening in vertebrate systems and to use this
platform to investigate the cognitive consequences of laterality
inversion.
Sergei Mirkin has received
a four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health for his
work on replication of simple DNA repeats. More than two dozen human
hereditary diseases are caused by uncontrollable expansions of
simple DNA repeats within individual human genes. They include
debilitating neurological disorders, such as Huntington’s disease,
fragile X mental retardation, myotonic dystrophy, Friedreich’s
ataxia and others. Sergei hopes to unravel molecular mechanisms
responsible for the phenomenon.
The Biology Department welcomes its newest faculty member,
Assistant Professor, Erik B. Dopman. Erik graduated with a B.S. in
Biology from the University of Texas at Austin and received his Ph.D. in Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University. His most recent position was
a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Erik’s interests are evolution and
genetics of natural populations.
Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellow News
Adam South, graduate student in the Lewis Lab, received a
fellowship from the National Science Foundation to do research this
past summer in Taiwan. He worked in the lab of Ping-Shih Yang, a
professor of entomology at National Taiwan University in Taipei,
investigating chemical defenses and characterizing nuptial gift
production in Taiwanese fireflies.
Read more about Adam’s work with fireflies >
Melissa Koch joined the Freudenreich lab in July.
She is a fellow of the Tufts TEACRS program, which aims to prepare postdoctoral
fellows for academic careers through training in teaching, career development
skills, and research.
Shoni Caine attended
the National Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) in San Francisco last month
and presented a poster entitled "Restoration of the pronephric kidney in
Xenopus laevis tadpoles". I obtained both a Tufts Graduate Student Travel
Award as well as a Student/Post-doc Travel Award from the SDB to attend the
conference. I also received an "honorary mention" for my poster, as well as a
text book award entitled "Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating
Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution" by Scott Gilbert & David Epel.
Ayron Strauch and Francie Chew were featured in an
online article this past month that was written for
Discovery.com and circulated by
MSNBC.com, amongst other places.
Ansel Payne was elected vice president of the
Cambridge Entomological Club for 2009-2010.
Minda Berbeco received a Graduate Women in Science Travel Grant; was a
Graduate Institute For Teaching Fellow and presented at the Ecological Society
of America conference.
Huai-ti Lin was awarded
a Doctoral dissertation improvement grant from the NSF. He attended and
presented at a Conference in Glasgow over the summer
Ranjith Anand received a scholarship from the
Keystone Symposia to attend the conference “Genome Instability and DNA Repair”
in Taos, NM, March 2009.
Ranjith also gave talks on his research at both the
Boston Area Yeast Meeting (Harvard/Broad) and the DNA Repair and Mutagenesis
Meeting (MIT) in 2008 and 2009.
Biology Graduate Student, Christine Surka, and
Postdoctoral Fellow, Lionel Gellon, attended the Unstable Microsatellites
and Human Disease conference in Costa Rica. Christine presented a poster on
replication stalling and stabilization at Fragile X CGG repeats and Lionel
presented a poster on the role of the Tof1/Mrc1 complex in replication of CAG
repeats. They both received an award from the poster contest selection
committee and $500 from the University of Costa Rica.
Priya Sundararajan graduated with a PhD, Feb 2009.
Thesis title: "Double Strand Break repair Pathways modulate CAG Repeat
Instability and Cytotoxicity"
Carolyn Miazga graduated with a PhD, July 2009.
Thesis title: "Notch Signaling Mediates Cell Fate Decisions During Gastrulation
in Xenopus laevis"
Nealia House graduated with her Masters in Science,
May 2009. Thesis Title: "The effect of chromatin structure on CAG/CTG repeat
maintenance"
Recent publications by Faculty and
Graduate Students >
News Archives: 2008-2009 |
