News

  • New paper by Eric Bruger shows how beneficial mutations can affect the ability for multiple metabolic pathways to coexist
    Congrats to Eric Bruger and his coauthors for his new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution that built upon our old work on epistatic interactions between beneficial mutations (Chou et al., 2011. Science) to show that beneficial mutations can also be key in how new…
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  • New paper describing the formaldehyde sensor EfgA is out in PLOS Biology, and two more from Jannell Bazurto expanding upon its role
    After a long period of work and many contributions from collaborators and many people within the lab our discovery of the formaldehyde sensor EfgA came out in a paper in PLOS Biology. This work, led by Jannell Bazurto (now faculty at University of Minnesota) and…
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  • All hail the veep: Deepa Agashe elected VP of the American Society of Naturalists
    Congratulations again to Deepa! She was elected Vice President of the American Society of Naturalists. She’ll even get to put together her own VP session at the Society’s 2022 meeting. Way to go!
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  • Congrats to Lon Chubiz on tenure
    I am thrilled to say that another former postdoc, Lon Chubiz, will become a tenured Associate Professor in the Biology Department at University of Missouri, St. Louis, as of Fall, 2021. After having also landed an NSF CAREER Award, way to kick butt, Lon!
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  • New paper on synthetic communities by Jessica Lee
    A paper in Microorganisms by former postdoc, Jessica Lee, now a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, came out earlier this year describing her development of a synthetic community that could degrade model plant-derived compounds. She uncovered myriad metabolic interactions that arose, including formaldehyde toxicity…
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  • Belated congrats to Josh Michener on his DOE Early Career Award
    I just realized that I never posted the great news from last year that Josh Michener, a former postdoc, won a DOE Early Career Award. This supports his lab’s work at ORNL on “Systems Metabolic Engineering of Novosphingobium aromaticivorans for Lignin Valorization.” Congratulations on the distinction, as…
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  • Congrats to Will Harcombe on tenure
    Shout out to former postdoc, Will Harcombe, on bring promoted to Associate Professor this past summer. Very exciting to see how well things have gone with his lab’s exploration of the evolution of cooperation.
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  • Deepa Agashe wins a national award from the Indian President
    Deepa Agashe, at NCBS in Bangalore, has been awarded one of three “SERB Women Excellence” Awards and was recognized directly by the president. Not that president, but the Indian President, Shri Ram Nath Kovind. As they call out on their website: Dr Deepa Agashe is…
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  • Dipti Nayak named a Searle Scholar!
    Congrats to Dipti Nayak, who is still in her first year of being an Assistant Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley, on being named one of the 15 Searle Scholars for 2020. She was honored due to exploring “how do archaea produce…
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  • The presentation that wasn’t…
    Remember March 1st of this year? Kids were in school and labs were open. As for me, I was about to get on a plane to fly from Copenhagen through to Denver for the American Physical Society (APS) general meeting to give a talk. With…
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