Maya Peters Kostman of the of the Larkin Lab was selected as the winner of the Department of Biology’s 2026 I. Alden Macchi Award for excellence in the field of regulatory biology. Maya studies the role of membrane potential in bacteria coping with nutrient stress. Aerobic microbes produce most of their energy via the electron transport […]
Brendan Kosztyo of the Wunderlich Lab received an honorable mention from the 2026 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Brendan recently joined the Wunderlich Lab, which studies how shadow enhancers in Drosophila confer robustness to gene expression in developmental and immune processes. Shadow enhancers are cis-regulatory elements that control expression of the same gene and […]
So Young Bae of the Tolan Lab recently received the Department of Biology’s 2026 Dr. Marion R. Kramer Scholarship. This award provides support for high-achieving women and female students in Biology. The award was established in 2001 in honor of Dr. Marion Kramer who earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Boston University in 1963 […]
Tommy Henry Taslim, a fifth-year PhD student in the Fuxman Bass Lab, recently received the Department of Biology’s 2026 Charles Terner Award. The Fuxman Bass Lab studies the regulatory crosstalk between viruses and human host cells. Tommy’s project is focused on investigating how retroviruses and double-stranded DNA viruses encode cis-regulatory elements that control transcription and […]
Megan Hopton of the Hao Lab recently attended the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) and Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Plasminogen Activation and Extracellular Proteolysis. She won the Best Presenter Award in the GRS and the Abstract Achievement Award in the GRC. The GRC is a discussion based event where a global network of scientists present prepublication […]
Anne Curtis of the Chantranupong Lab recently received a Neurophotonics T32 Fellowship. Recipients of this fellowship are expected to continue to complete all the requirements of the NPC Research Training Program, including taking a leadership role in an NPC Committee and/or assisting with future bootcamps. Anne is studying neuromelanin, a byproduct of dopamine metabolism, to investigate […]
Lily Fenton of the Dunlop Lab was accepted as a trainee in the NSF Graduate Research Traineeship Program in Biological Feedback Control for the 2025-2026 academic year. This program is an NSF funded research traineeship combining the study of the engineering principles in feedback control with investigations of how biological systems self-regulate, adapt, heal and evolve. […]
PhD student So Young Bae of the Tolan Lab received a Travel Award to present her research at the 2025 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) Annual Meeting. Her work was selected for both a 30-minute oral presentation and a poster presentation, and marked a notable achievement in the field of structural biology of ketohexokinase. So […]
Anne Curtis of the Chantranupong Lab received an honorable mention for the 2025 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Anne characterizes neuromelanin, a pigment lost in dopamine neurons during Parkinson’s Disease. Building off her stem cell experience at UC Santa Barbara, she is establishing the lab’s first induced pluripotent stem cell bank and optimizing the directed […]
Dr. Amanda Pinheiro, an MCBB PhD alum of the Naya Lab, recently published a paper in the journal Development. Dr. Pinheiro’s paper was selected to appear as a “Research Highlight”, and both she and Dr. Naya were interviewed by the journal in “The people behind the papers” to discuss the significance of their work. This […]