2019 - Year in Review

A Top 10 List of RRG Lab Highlights:

1) We were awarded 2 grants this year from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the McKnight Foundation. These grants will fund our work on nervous system regeneration in the coming years.

2) Graduate student Jennifer Jenkins passed her Qualifying Exam.

3) We welcomed several new lab members: graduate student Tulip Chandra and undergraduate students Rachel Grimes, Anusha Jain, Labo Oke, & Raag Patel.

4) Several undergraduate students finished their time in the lab, with many contributing valuable data and two - Jada Summerville and Yamini Chavan - writing undergraduate theses.

5) We enjoyed lots of exciting science events on campus, including Developmental Biology Alliance Fall Symposia and the Regenerative Bioscience Center Connections Series. We also had many wonderful guest speakers.

6) We participated in several excellent outreach activities. One highlight was our student-led STEMzone booth.

7) We tried some exciting new career development activities during group meeting: elevator pitches; storyboarding; mock peer review; & image processing.

8) We worked together to gather data on several exciting projects, with strong efforts toward getting multiple projects close to publication.

9) RRG taught Cell Biology and a First Year Odyssey class and loved getting to know her new classroom students.

10) We had fun and learned lots!

STEMzone and late fall update

We had a great November in the lab, with Sneha Kotagudda Murali Mohan rotating with us. She has done a great job so far!

We have also had undergrads hard at work with their presentations and mini-papers. It has been bittersweet to have our senior undergrads - Jada, Yamini, and Lauren - wrapping up their last semester in the lab. I will be sad to see them go!

Finally, one of our big efforts in November was the STEMzone booth. Lab members did a great job putting together an educational plan, activities, and fun visual aids. It was really fun for all of us and we hope that our visitors learned something new. We were happy to see that the “What did you learn?” board was full of comments about regeneration!

Congrats to Tulip

We recently celebrated graduate student Tulip Chandra’s submission of her NSF GRFP proposal. It is really hard work to put together your first grant proposal and Tulip was super thoughtful in the way she approached her writing, scholarship, and the nuts and bolts of finishing up her first grant submission. Great job, Tulip!

Preparations for 2019 STEMzone

Under the leadership of graduate student Jennifer Jenkins (and with help from many lab members), our group has been developing a booth for 2019 STEMzone, an annual event in which departments and labs share STEM outreach booths at a UGA football game. We’re looking forward to participating in this event on November 9, 2019. R-G lab students developed a promotional video for our booth (see here). We also took some photos of my hilarious students setting up their shots.

2nd rotation!

Whew! This is a busy semester for the lab. We really enjoyed having Miranda Arnold join us for the first rotation and are happy to have Felicia Ebot-Ojong and Alex Waugh joining us for the 2nd rotation. I am also in the midst of teaching Cell Biology (CBIO3400) for the first time. The students are great and it has been challenging, but also awesome and fun. I’m also coteaching a First Year Odyssey seminar on finding and succeeding in research with my colleague Dr. Amanda Frossard (Chemistry); our students are so eager to learn and excited about finding a research group to join. It has been really fun to hear their ideas and watch them settle into college life. We have a couple of grants due this month and are eager to move lots of scientific progress forward in the remainder of the semester.