Wiring the Brain @ University of Maryland School of Medicine
Noury Khim, unflinching scientist vs. the pandemic! Taking on the hurdles of social distancing, Noury live streams a procedure from a head mounted phone to train the lab’s incoming graduate students. To research and teach against all odds, you gotta be strong… #ScienceWomanStrong
Colin Robertson comes to us from the Program in Neuroscience, with a particular interest in synapse pruning and circuit maturation. From day one, Colin (on the left) fit right in…! More soon on the exciting new science he’s after!
Cheryl Brandenburg comes to us from the Hussman Institute, and brings with her a PhD in Neuroscience, a knack for cerebellar circuits, and a passion for autism research! We’re excited to see where she takes her science next…!
Bek Altas and Alex Poulopoulos were Awarded by the Graduate School of Life Sciences with the 2020 Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence in Mentorship Award and Teacher of the Year Award, a lab dynamic duo in mentorship!!!
Congratulations to PIN postdoctoral fellow Dr. Bekir Altas for winning the Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence in Mentorship Award for an outstanding record of supportive mentorship to PIN and GPILS trainees! pic.twitter.com/RJNx37O9lJ
— Univ of Maryland School of Medicine Neuroscience (@UMMedNeuro) October 26, 2020
Ryan Richardson, the lab’s first postdoc, has joined the NIH Office of the Director, BRAIN Initiative with a prestigious AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship! Congratulations Ryan, we’re proud of you!!!
Read the press release of Ryan’s award:
The lab’s first pub is a nifty piece of synth bio for genome editing the brain. Richardson et al. describe a platform to test and develop new high-precision genome editing reagents. Some of our new CRISPR fusions, like eRad18-Cas9-CtIP with linear donors, showed up to 45-times higher accuracy at point-mutation editing compared to vanilla CRISPR. Another step toward direct in vivo knockin and in situ gene therapy approaches!
And now some good news for a change… BIG CONGRATS to Marilyn Steyert and Uriel Jean-Baptist for cleaning house on their graduate school applications!
Come next semester, Marilyn will be a PhD student in the Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Program at UC San Francisco, and Uriel will be a PhD student in the Biological & Biomedical Sciences Program (BBSP) at UNC Chapel Hill. We will miss you both, and you both will make us proud!
(photo by T. Soykan)
The lab has fun recreating Raphael’s “The School of Athens” in Chicago, while presenting at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience!
Ryan, Marilyn, and Jeffrey unveiled their new approach to high efficiency in vivo genome engineering with in situ CRISPR:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/65807
Bek, Andrea, Noury, and Uriel debuted their findings on how a mutation in a family with intellectual disability affects the dynactin complex and cortical circuit wiring:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/66733
Alex presented new findings on how phosphorylation of Neuroligin adhesion molecules determines synapse specificities:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/58703
And how reciprocal adhesion gradient matching guides the development of cortical circuitry:
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/7883/presentation/63936
… and Garrett stashed us some sweet top-shelf probes…
Garrett Bunce from the Program in Neuroscience joins the lab. Garrett will apply his training in Systems and Computational Neuroscience to develop recording strategies for listening in on in situ genome engineered rat brains… Welcome Garrett!
