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December 5, 2022: Impact of international travel and diarrhea on gut microbiome and resistome dynamics
PMB grad student Kevin Blake (Dantas lab) is a co-author.
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December 2, 2022: New PhD!
Congratulations to Dr. Patricia Walker (Pakrasi lab)!
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October 10, 2022: Connecting the disordered tail of FtsZ to bacterial cell division.
PMB grad student Jessie Bullock (Levin lab) is a co-author.
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October 10, 2022: PMB Retreat
The annual PMB Retreat at the St. Louis Zoo with Prof. Liz Haswell as the keynote speaker, along with a dozen student and postdoc talks and a zoo-wide scavenger hunt.
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October 7, 2022: Student-led Biotech Consulting Group Brings Science Beyond the Bench
PMB student Natasha Bilkey (Dixit lab) and current president of the Biotechnology and Life Science Advising Group (BALSA), talks about the important role BALSA plays to support the St. Louis entrepreneurial community and graduate students looking for opportunities to gain skills outside of the lab.
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October 6, 2022: New PhD!
Congratulations to Dr. Kari Miller (Haswell lab)! Kari heads to BioGenerator, the startup arm of BioSTL, as an investment analyst.
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October 3, 2022: Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence
Ryan Calcutt (Dixit lab) was selected as a finalist and Kari Miller (Haswell lab) as a semi-finalist for this new Arts & Sciences award that recognizes exemplary accomplishments of graduate students in their thesis research.
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August 25, 2022: New PhD!
Congratulations to Dr. Jenny Codjoe (Haswell lab)! Jenny will start as a postdoc in the Shah lab at the Danforth Plant Science Center to work on a collaborative project with CoverCress, Inc.
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July 29, 2022: 2022 William H Danforth Plant Science Fellows
Cheyenne Anderson (Penczykowski lab), Katherine Benza (Dixit lab), Vincent Brazelton (Topp lab), Stefanie King (Nusinow lab), and Pratheek Pandesha (Slotkin lab) are the 2022 Fellows. Anna Wassel (EEPB program, Myers lab) is the 2022 George Hayward Plant Biology Graduate Fellow.
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July 11, 2022: Strengthening the Cell Wall in Pollen
PMB student Kari Miller (Haswell lab) is lead author on a paper in Current Biology that uses a combination of experiments and kinetic models to show that a mechxnosensitive channel strengthens the cell wall, but not as originally proposed.
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June 29, 2022: Alum News
Biology spotlights PMB alum Amelia Nguyen and her journey from the Pakrasi lab to the EPA.
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June 24, 2022: New PhD!
Congratulations to Dr. Maria Sorkin (Nusinow lab)! Maria heads to Gingko Bioworks as an organism engineer this summer.
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May 6, 2022: Welcome to PMB 2022!
Incoming students – Xinrui (Sherry) Ji, Patricia Gallardo, Ming (Celene) Xia, Dong-gyu Kim, Tianyi (David) Li, & Magdalena Janik (not shown)
and transfer students – Jia Gwee and Huy Le – from U Wisconsin as the Zhong lab joins Biology!
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May 5, 2022: PMB Alum News
Congratulations to Leo Yan (former Zaher lab member; now in the Kostova lab at the Carnegie Institute) on being named a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow!
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May 3, 2022: New National Academy Member!
Congratulations to PMB faculty member Blake Meyers (DDPSC) on his election to the Academy.
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April 20, 2022: New PhD!
Congratulations to Dr. Virginia Johnson (Pakrasi lab)! Ginger heads to Bayer Crop Science this summer.
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April 19, 2022: From rare soil microbe, a new antibiotic candidate
The Blodgett lab discovers unusual dimeric piperazyl cyclopeptides encoded by the bacterium Lentzea flaviverrucosa (Li et al., 2022 Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 119, e2117941119). PMB alum Yunci Qi is a co-author.
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April 18, 2022: Annual Varner Lecture
Dominique Bergmann (Stanford) – Mechanisms of Dynamic and Tunable Development in Plant Leaves.
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April 4, 2022: NSF Graduate Research Fellows
PMB students Will McHargue (Dixit lab) received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Olivia Gomez (Umen lab) an honorable mention in this years competition.
In addition, two other Biology graduate students – Ethan Abercrombie and Sarah Swiston received NSF fellowships, as did Biology alum Gabe Small and Ali Wilkening. Biology alum Isaac Plutzer and Emily Dewald-Wang were honorable mentions.
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March 29, 2022: Cellular Transformations – when architecture and biology meet
Ram Dixit and Sung Ho Kim (Professor in Architecture) have taught a course that bridges biology and architecture and have published a book on the course.
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March 30, 2022: Vierstra Lab Nature Paper
Recent work from the Vierstra lab reveals the molecular blueprint of how plants perceive light.
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March 18, 2022: Olsen Lab Science Paper
The Olsen lab is part of a global team who used white clover as a model for how urban development drives plant adaptation.
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January 31, 2022: John E Majors Awardees
Jenny Codjoe (Haswell lab) and Ryan Emenecker (Strader/Holehouse labs) are selected as the 2021 John E. Majors awardees. This award was created to recognize senior-level thesis students for outstanding research and teaching accomplishments.
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January 26, 2022: American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
PMB faculty member Liz Haswell is named as a AAAS Fellow. Liz, along with Biology faculty member Erik Herzog, join six other WUSTL faculty elected as Fellows this year – congratulations to all!
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January 9, 2022: Transcriptional Control in Maize Anther Development
PMB student Lily O’Connor (Meyers lab) is a co-author on a Plant Cell paper.