Fun news from Fall 2023

Our students are in the Finals period, wrapping another successful semester. I thought I’d share some fun things we have been up to this fall:

  • Several lab members went to a UGA volleyball match.

  • Lab folks have been lobbying for a lab pet.

  • My Queen of the Night plant bloomed; this is historically a good luck charm because the last time it bloomed I got my job at UGA.

  • I made a fun visit as a student-invited speaker at U Colorado Anschutz Medical School.

  • I celebrated my first Lilly Fellows family dinner as a Lilly alum (pictured with Anny Chung from Plant Bio, a current Lilly Fellow).

  • Our technician, Chris, has started a cottage industry of taking lab waste and converting it into jewelry.

  • We have some rad new data stickers for progress on our projects.

  • I got a sparkly Christmas tree for my office.

Congratulations, Dr. Chandra!

Congratulations to Dr. Bidushi (Tulip) Chandra on completion and successful defense of her Ph.D. dissertation. She did such a fantastic job exploring planarian glia and you can check out her paper here. We are so very proud of her and enjoyed celebrating her on her big day! Yay for you, Tulip!

New academic year - what we’re up to!

New year! We are celebrating 6 years as a lab and have lots of fun things going on. To end the summer, David presented at the CURO Fellows Symposium. We also had the annual Cell Biology Retreat and enjoyed good company and good science. Taylor won a Golden Pipette award for her short talk!

As we swing into the new academic year, we have lots of excitement going on:
- Rachel is back to teaching Cell Biology and a GradFIRST course. She is also cooking up some grant applications.
- Tulip just had her paper accepted and she is writing her dissertation to defend her Ph.D. in the coming months!
- Taylor is taking a well-deserved break from teaching after TAing for two semesters at UGA and being the instructor of record for a virtual class this fall.
- Kendall is TAing for Intro Biology, gaining some teaching experience.
- Taylor and Kendall are finishing up revisions on our LDB/SSDP paper and working on their neurogenesis project, putting together data for their screen paper.
- Christina, Macey, and Skylar are starting a new slate of grad courses, scheduling their first committee meetings, and beginning the process of preparing for their qualifying exams. They are busy at the bench, too, with some awesome new results and project trajectories!
- Catherine is returning as the senior undergrad (she is the same year as Pierce and Natalie, but 1 semester more experienced!). She is transitioning to more independence at the bench and is doing great!
- Pierce and Natalie, two new undergrads, are joining us! They are mentored by Macey and Kendall.