This spring there have been a lot of changes around the lab…
– Our technician Bill Urciuoli graduated his MBA from the Simon School of Business at UR (tuition benefits FTW), and left us in April to start a new job in Williamsport PA. We will have a few weeks without a technician (oh joy!) and our new Tech’ will hopefully be starting on June 1.
– Long-term colleague Dr. Chad Galloway has started a new job as a staff scientist in the Department of Ophthalmology here at URMC. Here’s a picture of Bill and Chad at their leaving party – the bucket on the floor is part of a beer brewing kit they each got as a leaving gift.
– We’ve also had an RIT co-op student in the lab’ for the past 3 months. Nick Gulati has been doing a lot of 3D printing, and we recently obtained some electrically-conductive printer filament from Proto-Pasta, which he’s been using to print custom electrodes (more news on this soon).
– Our multi-PI R01 (with Keith Nehrke from Medicine and Cole Haynes from Sloan Kettering) got funded! The project is entitled “Role of the mitochondrial UPR in ischemic protection”, and as the name suggests, will seek to characterize the key players in the mitochondrial unfolded protein response, and how activating this pathway might be able to protect the heart from ischemia-reperfusion injury.
– Andrew Wojtovich (former psot-doc’ and now an R.A.P. in the Department of Medicine) got a fundable score on his first R01, entitled “Optogenetic control of mitochondrial ROS generation”. Andrew was also selected to give a talk at the annual Biochemistry Department retreat.
– We were privileged to host Aubrey DeGrey of the SENS research foundation, for a seminar. I’ve known Aubrey since >20 years ago from the UK, so it was great to catch up on old times and hear all about his exciting recent advances in aging research.
– We had a visit from former grad’ student Dr. Lindsay Burwell, who reports that she’s going to start a new position as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Wells College this fall.
Congratulations!