Department of Genetics
May 2026
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Frederick “Eric” Arnold, PhD and Collaborators Receive Longitude Prize on ALS Discovery Award |
Frederick “Eric” Arnold, PhD, an assistant professor of Genetics and collaborators from the University of Idaho have been selected to receive a £100,000 Discovery Award through the Longitude Prize on ALS, an international initiative focused on accelerating the discovery of new treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) using artificial intelligence. Read more »
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Turan Tufan, PhD, Receives Prestigious Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship |
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Turan Tufan, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Ting Wang’s lab has been awarded a highly competitive three-year fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, recognizing his exceptional promise as an early-career scientist and supporting his innovative research in biomedical science.
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Undergraduate researcher Vikram Karra awarded Goldwater Scholarship |
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Vikram Karra, an undergraduate researcher in the Tristan Li lab has been awarded the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. Karra, who is studying neuroscience in the biology major in Arts & Sciences, aims to be a physician-scientist advancing neuroscience research and translating discoveries into therapies for neurodegenerative disease.
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WashU Medicine Genetics Ranks No. 5 in NIH Funding for 2025 |
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The Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has been ranked No. 5 in the nation for NIH funding in 2025, according to the latest report from the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research. The achievement places WashU Medicine’s genetics department among the nation’s most well-funded hubs of genetic discovery, ahead of many prestigious research institutions.
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Novel tool uncovers a common genetic cause of peripheral neuropathy |
The Jin lab and collaborating institutions have developed a novel computational tool that can accurately identify a genetic problem in a gene called RFC1 that is linked to certain forms of peripheral neuropathy. The new research is published in Annals of Neurology.
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Tychele Turner, PhD and the Turner lab highlighted by the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center |
The story highlights how Dr. Turner’s team developed publicly available genomic analysis tools within CAVATICA to help researchers move more easily from Kids First data access to meaningful analysis. Read more »
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Research from the Egervari lab highlighted by Nature |
The story titled "This compound enhances long-term memory of mice — but only in females" highlighted a recent publication from the Egervari lab. Read more »
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Mitchell Grinwald receives the Children's Tumor Foundation Young Investigator Award |
Congratulations to Mitchell Grinwald, MSTP student in the Wang lab on receiving the Children's Tumor Foundation Young Investigator Award! Grinwald’s project title is “Discover Dark Genome Biology and Therapeutic Vulnerabilities in Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumor”.
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| Holly Godin, PhD awarded the 2026 W. M. Keck Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biomedical Research
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Congratulations to Holly Godin, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in the Meers lab on being awarded a 2026 W. M. Keck Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biomedical Research. Her project is titled, “Nucleosome modifiers of pioneer factor function in gene regulation and disease".
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Graduate student Zitian Tang in the Jin lab has been selected for the 2026 Summer Intern – Computational Science and Informatics at Roche. Congrats! |
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Zihan Dong, an undergraduate student in the Ushiki Lab, received a Summer Undergraduate Research Guided Experience (SURGE) award for the project “Identifying and Testing Bat Accelerated Regions (BARs) from 470 Mammalian Genomes.” Congrats! |
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Jack Yu, a rising sophomore at WashU, has been selected into WashU’s Summer Undergraduate Research Guided Experience (SURGE) program and will join the Jin lab this summer! |
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Aki Ushiki, PhD received the 2026 CRM Senior Innovator Award and a $40,000 seed grant from the Center of Regenerative Medicine for the project “Identifying Injury-Responsive Enhancers in Adult Dental Epithelial Stem Cells.”
- Tristan Qingyun Li, PhD in collaboration with Dr. Patricia Dickson’s lab received a pilot grant from the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders. Their project is titled, "Exploratory studies of microglia in Sanfilippo B mice".
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The Egervari lab celebrated lab members Erica Periandri, Kala Dodson and Amelia Barfield. They will be joining PhD Programs at WashU, Penn and Stanford this fall respectively. Congratulations! |
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The Yang Li lab attended the 2026 MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) conference. Wanying Wu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab was selected for an oral presentation titled "Multimodal Atlas of DNA Regulatory Elements Across Human and Mammalian Cells". Xiaoxiao Zhou, a senior research assistant in the lab, won a travel award with her poster: Prior-knowledge Guided Tokenizers in DNA language models. Congrats!
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We’re excited to share that the Department of Genetics has officially launched our LinkedIn page! Follow us to stay up to date on the latest news within our community. We also encourage you to invite your connections to follow the page and help us grow our network. |
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"Homozygous RFC1 AAGGG Repeat Expansions Are Common in Idiopathic Peripheral Neuropathy" in Annals of Neurology, Jin lab
"Epigenetic and Transcriptomic Impacts of Ethanol Vary by Brain Region and Extent of Exposure" in eNeuro, Egervari lab
"Acetate enhances long-term memory in female mice by sex-, context-, and brain region–specific epigenetic and transcriptional remodeling" in Science Signaling, Egervari lab
"Sex differences in exploration–exploitation strategies during home-cage decision making" preprint, Dougherty lab
"In Vivo Massively Parallel Reporter Assay Reveals Sequence Determinants of mRNA Localization in Astrocytes" preprint, Dougherty lab
"Accelerating discovery of cancer causes for prevention in the era of rising early-onset cancers" in Cell, Wang lab
"Quantifying reference alignment bias in functional genomics analyses" in Cell Reports Methods, Wang lab
"Characterizing cytosine methylation of polymorphic transposable element insertions using human pangenome resources" in Genome Research, Wang lab
"TaRGET II Data Portal: a multi-omics resource for environmental toxicant studies in mice" in Nature Communications, Wang lab
"SMURF Reconstructs Single-Cells from Visium HD Data to Reveal Zonation of Transcriptional Programs in the Intestine" accepted to Nature Communications, Mitra lab
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