News
This week, we say a bittersweet goodbye to our absolutely fantastic technician, Britessia Smith. She is moving on to a career in occupational therapy, but she has been a huge asset to our group intellectually, logistically, technically, and personally. We will miss her so much, but we are excited for her new personal and professional adventures!
[Here she is showing off the recirculation system she built for our planarians, with advice from Shane Merryman at Stowers Inst.]
Congratulations to graduate student Kendall Clay for being awarded a Genetics T32 training grant! Kendall is working on mechanisms of regenerative neurogenesis. Yay for you, Kendall!
It has been difficult to miss in-person conferences this year, but RRG has been happy to work with Drs. Carrie Adler, Erin Davies, Beth Duncan, Mansi Srivastava, and Josien van Wolfswinkel (planarian/acoel-studying colleagues) to create the Flatworm Friday virtual seminar series. We have really enjoyed the series so far and our student, Jennifer Jenkins, had the opportunity to share her work. Looking forward to good company and exciting over the next several months!
Well, I suppose I should write a 2020 wrap-up for posterity’s sake. This was a very challenging year for the lab, with a COVID-19 related shut-down that interrupted our lab work and lives for several months. Despite these great challenges, we have had several bright spots this year. Here are 10 great things that happened for the lab this year (in no particular order):
We successfully recruited two new graduate students through the ILS rotation season: Kendall Clay and Taylor Medlock. Lab members did an excellent job hosting rotation students safely mid-pandemic (including creation of a suite of training videos). We’re excited to have them join us!
Graduate student Tulip Chandra passed her qualifying exam.
Rachel received an NSF CAREER award.
Jennifer presented her exciting research virtually at the Society for Developmental Biology meeting.
We prioritized self-care and mental health with a lab wellness check and other related activities.
We held our first ever lab career development week (we liked it so much we made it 2 weeks long!).
Our Spring undergraduates (Rachel, Raag, Labo, and Anusha) virtually presented their work at the CURO Symposium.
Rachel was invited to write a Perspective and a book chapter, published in the summer and out in 2021 respectively.
Britessia built a fancy recirculation system for the lab which is almost complete!
We submitted our first research paper from the lab, which is in review but which can be found at bioRxiv!
I’m grateful for the support that my trainees have offered to each other in this truly difficult year. I’m so grateful for the support of colleagues, particularly junior faculty members at UGA and around the country, who unfailingly offered their time and generously offered their friendship (and made me laugh when I needed it most). Wishing you and yours all the best (especially good health and research progress) in 2021.
We were really happy to have Anna Iouchmanov and Kendall Clay with us for the 2nd rotation, which wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. They worked so well together and it was a joy to welcome such bright and cooperative team members into the group for a while. They, like our 1st rotation students, were so adaptable and resilient in training during a pandemic. We enjoyed their enthusiasm and interest in the work, too! They worked on cloning some genes we’re interested in studying and we’re excited to continue this work!
