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…!
Congrats to Bek and Alex for Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence in Mentorship and Teacher of the Year Awards!
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
Congrats to Ryan for joining NIH BRAIN Initiative as a AAAS Fellow!
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:
UM School of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow Awarded Prestigious AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship
Congrats to Ryan and co. for “Cas9 fusions for precision in vivo editing” out on the bioRxiv!
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!
Garrett’s Sidewalk Brain Q&A
Look out for these PouLab super stars at UNC and UCSF !
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!
The Lab goes to Chicago…
(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…
First day in lab for new PhD student from PiN!
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!
Lab receives NIH Director’s New Innovator Award!
Our lab received an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, hurray!!!
The NIH Common Fund just announced the recipients of its 2019 High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program. The award comes with generous funding that will allow our research to keep being strange. Thanks to all!
image from nih.gov
Lab welcomes three new STARs!!!
We are very excited to welcome the newest PouLab members, three talented postbac scholars from UMB’s prestigious STAR-PREP program will become the lab’s youngest investigators! Jefferey Inen, mouse geneticist & cancer biologist extraordinaire from UMBC, will work with Ryan Richardson; Saovleak “Noury” Khim, all-round development-to-regenerative neuroscientist from Temple, and Uriel Jean-Baptiste, hardcore structure-function biochemist from Florida State, will work with Bek Altas. Welcome to your new lab, enjoy your research, and get lots of great data!
