| Greetings from Genetics and Biochemistry
| |
|
Spring semester has been a busy time for recruiting new faculty and new graduate students to our department. We’ve been quite successful this year and expect three new tenure-track assistant professors to join us in the fall, along with a dozen new Ph.D. students. (We’ll have profiles on them in our next newsletter.) We are also seeing growth in our new one-year professional master’s track and continue to strengthen our connections to the life sciences industry in South Carolina.
This spring also saw approval by the Board of Trustees to enclose a portion of the atrium of the Life Sciences Building, which will become our new departmental home. We hope to move our offices there from Poole Hall early this fall.
Most importantly, our faculty and students continue to thrive and excel, as you’ll see in the stories below.
Go Tigers!
| |
| |
Learning by doing: Undergraduate research opens doors and minds
| |
Undergrad research allows students to take knowledge to the next level: “We can talk about how discoveries are made. We can talk about how we know what we know. But for students to discover new things for themselves or be a part of the knowledge discovery process is the next level above what we can do in the classroom,” said Kim Paul, associate professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry. Read more here!
| |
|
5 Ph.D.s awarded this spring
| |
With the end of the academic year, five new Ph.D.s were awarded. Here are their hometowns and next career steps:
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
- Chenyan Chang, Shanxi, China: Postdoc at Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
- Jillian Elisa Milanes, Aiken, South Carolina: Staying for a short postdoc with Professor Jim Morris.
Genetics
- Oly Ahmed, Central, Bangladesh: Returning to his home country to pursue a career with possible prospects in the UK.
- Emily Wagner Knight, Kingsport, Tennessee: Staying for a short postdoc with Professor Meredith Morris.
- Jacklyn Thomas, Benton, Arkansas: Pursuing employment in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area.
| |
College of Science Awards — winners from G&B:
- Erin Jones: Outstanding Junior in Science
- Danielle LaVigne: Outstanding Senior in Science
- Lucy Jennings: Blue Key Academic and Leadership Award
- Krishna Patel: Phi Kappa Phi Certificate of Merit
- Jillian Milanes: Outstanding Graduate in Discovery — Experimental
Departmental Awards:
- Danielle Lavigne: William Marcotte Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award
- Jin Cho: Outstanding Graduate in Learning — Biochemistry
- Jackie Thomas: Outstanding Graduate in Learning — Genetics
- Rebecca MacPherson: Outstanding Graduate in Discovery — Genetics
- Jillian Milanes: Outstanding Graduate in Discovery — Biochemistry
Fullbright Scholarship:
- Kendra Gordillo, an alum from genetics, received a Fulbright Scholarship this year. Gordillo will pursue her master’s degree in the Netherlands.
President’s and Dean’s Lists for Fall 2022:
- 158 students on the President’s List
- 121 on the Dean’s List
| |
|
Gary Powell to leave club advising role
| |
This year was the last year that Emeritus Professor Gary Powell will be the academic adviser for the Biochemistry and Genetics Club. Michael Harris, Ph.D., will be assuming that role, and Todd Lyda, Ph.D., will assist.
Powell will remain part of the community and still intends to be available, as invited, to help with club activities. Powell is working on an endowment for undergraduate students to provide travel money for them to visit laboratories with the club and, funds permitting, for graduate students to make presentations at meetings. He anticipates the Powell Family Endowment to be fully funded early next year with funding possibly available by fall 2024.
| |
Doctoral student Ryan Watts (with Professor Hong Luo) sees endless opportunities in science! When opportunity knocks, you answer. A must-read right here!
| |
Sabrina Pizarro, in Jim Morris’s group, was awarded an NIH supplement to support her graduate work. This award will support more than two years of research and focuses on her efforts to explore the role of acidification of cellular compartments in kinetoplastid parasites to regulate glucose metabolism.
Chuan Liang (working with Weiguo Cao) received ASBMB 2023 Graduate Student or Postdoctoral Researcher Award. Read about the award.
Spencer Hatfield (with Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt) received a competitive F31 award from the NIH for $47,000 (for Systems Genetics of Cocaine Preference in Drosophila) to study the genetics of Cocaine Use Disorder.
| |
Two students from the Department each won a Best Student Presentation Award at the International Conference on Canine and Feline Genetics and Genomics in Huntsville, Alabama, in October.
Shawna Cook (left) is a genetics undergraduate alumna who recently earned her doctoral degree from Purdue University. Elizabeth Greif (right) is a doctoral candidate in the Clemson Canine Genetics Lab under Leigh Anne Clark, Ph.D. (principal investigator).
| |
Alex Hawk, a fifth-year graduate student with Jennie Mason, won the International Journal of Molecular Sciences Best Poster award at the EU-US Conference on endogenous DNA damage at Stony Brook University. The award was presented after an insightful session with 2015 Nobel laureate [ARCB1] [DFC2] Tomas Lindahl, who remained on stage to congratulate the awardees!
| |
Austin Herbert, a second-year Ph.D. student, has published his first paper in the Lackey Lab, “How does Precursor RNA Structure Influence RNA Processing and Gene Expression?”
| |
|
Our department is growing!
| |
» An introduction to our newest assistant professor, Stephen Dolan, Ph.D, who will start with us in EPIC this fall.
I am Stephen Dolan, and I look forward to opening my laboratory at Clemson EPIC this coming August! I am currently a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation postdoctoral fellow hosted in Marvin Whiteley’s Ph.D. laboratory at Georgia Tech and the Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center in Atlanta.
I was granted my Ph.D. in 2016 from Maynooth University, Ireland, under the direction of Sean Doyle, Ph.D. For this work, I used comparative ’omics and reverse genetics to characterize novel regulators of toxin production in the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus.
I then moved to the University of Cambridge as a research fellow in the laboratory of principal investigator, Martin Welch, Ph.D. This allowed me to apply my comparative ’omics experience to another key respiratory pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, whilst also providing me with the skills to examine the physiology of multiple organisms in clinically relevant, fungal-bacterial interactions. My current research is focused on understanding the mechanistic basis of polymicrobial interactions between A. fumigatus and P. aeruginosa during CF infection. Using clinical isolates from the Emory-Children’s CF Center, I’m interested in how the physiology of both partners is altered upon co-culture in a recapitulated CF environment when compared to monoculture.
I aim to leverage my unique cross-kingdom insight to unravel how fungi respond to bacteria (and vice versa) and other cues found in polymicrobial environments.
| |
|
