Chrischi successfully defended his PhD today! He was part of the group from the beginning and we will all miss him as a scientist, a colleague, and a friend when he leaves for his postdoc with Boris Striepen in a few weeks. A big thank you to everyone for coming, both in person and virtually.
She was talking about her work on Metabolic regulation of sexual commitment in Plasmodium falciparum at the Annual ASTMH Meeting.
His talk A double-edged sword in Kelch13-mediated artemisinin resistance in P. falciparum described a the role of a translational regulator in parasites recovering from artemisinin exposure. Look for a pre-print in the near future.
Chantal won the award for work on the Metabolic regulation of sexual commitment in Plasmodium falciparum. Well done Chantal! Keep an eye out for the upcoming pre-print.
I’m honored and a bit embarrassed to have been selected as the recipient of the Weill Cornell Graduate School Faculty Diversity Award along with my Social Justice & Anti-Racism Task Force co-chair Prof. Monica Guzman. A big thank you to all the task force members for their tremendous efforts this past year.
Well done Kit!
https://www.americanaustralian.org/scholarships/education-fund/education-fund-past-scholars/
A Big Congratulations to Coco!
Her rotation project developing a new assay for identifying targets of histone reader domains in malaria parasites won not one, but TWO poster awards! It sure was worth waiting for the labs to re-open to get her into working on this.
Outstanding Poster at the 16th Annual Tri-Institutional Chemical Biology Symposium at Rockefeller University.
AND
Honorable Mention Poster Award at the 31st Annual Molecular Parasitology Meeting.
Unfortunately, Coco decided to follow the alluring call of RNA binding proteins and joined the Lima Lab for her thesis work, leaving the project all teed for the next student!
With all the COVID distraction, I fell behind on updating our webpage but we have several new publications to share. We’ve got two papers on the effect of epigenetic inhibitors on malaria parasites, a new review on sexual commitment, and a new manuscript in BioRxiv.
Leen’s epigenetic inhibitor screen was published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and we contributed to a study by Krista Matthews & Elisabeth Martinez at UT Southwestern on the effects of Jumonji demethylase inhibitors that was published in ACS Infectious Diseases.
Gaëlle and Divya wrote a nice piece on the environmental factors in regulating sexual commitment in Current Opinion in Microbiology.
And finally Riward and Xinran’s work describing a new regulator of gene expressed that is essential for gametocyte development is now available on BioRxiv.
Stay tuned, more to come soon!
Dr. Kit Kennedy from the University of Melbourne (left), Dr. Gaelle Neveu from the Institut Cochin in Paris (middle), and Dr. Divya Beri from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (right).
All three of our past ACCESS summer student are entering Ph.D. programs at top research universities:
Gabrielle Paniccia (Stony Brook) is joining the graduate program at Rockefeller. Victor Vazquez Marrero (University of Puerto Rico, San Juan) is headed to the Immunology Program at University of Pennsylvania. Scott Segura (University of Texas, Dallas) will start his doctorate in Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Texas, Medical Branch in Galveston.
And Nusrat Tabassum , who spent two summers with us, will start college at [stay tuned] when she graduates from the Bronx High School of Science in a few months.
Congratulations to all of you! I’m excited to see what great things you do next.
A big congratulations to Nusrat Tabassum! She beat out 32 other competitors to win 2nd Place in the Microbiology Category the New York City Science & Engineering Fair. Her project “Investigating the Binding Affinity and the Dimerization Behavior of the Homeodomain-like Domain Protein PfHDP1” was the result of two summers in our lab working with Riward. Nice job Nusrat !
Congratulations to our ACCESS summer research student Gabrielle Paniccia for her presentation award at the 2018 ABRCMS meeting. Nice Work Gaby!
Gaby Paniccia
We've got some great students in the lab for the summer!
Gabrielle Paniccia is a rising senior studying biochemistry at Stony Brook University and Nusrat Tabassum is back with us for her second summer before starting her final year at the Bronx High School of Science.
Nusrat Tabassum
We just received our Notice of Award for a joint R01 between the Deitsch and Kafsack Labs. I'm super excited about this project and we are looking to hire two post-docs ASAP. Click here for details if you are interested.
Racking them up and knocking them down! Keep it up Chrischi!
Exciting project to identify small molecule inhibitors of gametocyte development starting this fall.
Contact me if you are interested.
Chrischi and Asaf were selected as co-recipients of the 2018 Julian R. Rachele Prize for our Nature paper, “Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals a signature of sexual commitment in malaria parasites." This award recognizes the best paper by a Weill Cornell/Sloan Kettering Ph.D. student published in the past 12 months.
Well deserved recognition for two great young scientists!
Congratulations Guys!
He'll be getting his PhD at University of Texas, Medical Branch in Galveston.
Congratulations Scott!
Xinran was the first person I hired and her dedication, skills, and personality were indispensable in getting the Kafsack Lab off the ground! Unfortunately, our efforts to clone her have failed and we'll have to make do without her. As a silver lining, she decided to join our BCMB Ph.D. program here at Weill Cornell after weighing several offers.
Thank you for everything Xinran!
I'm so proud to have awesome students like her in my lab!
Keep an eye out for her exciting work in the future...
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