Lab update, March 2021

Well, it’s been about a year since the last website update…and what a year it has been. There is no point belaboring the challenges of doing research under pandemic restrictions, but I’m proud of the tremendous resilience shown by the lab. If nothing else, this year has confirmed the vital importance of research on infectious diseases.

A few updates:

– Three postdoctoral fellows have departed for greener pastures in the past year: Andrew Sandstrom is now an Asst Prof at UT Southwestern, Patrick Mitchell is now an Asst Prof at University of Washington, and Lívia Yamashiro is now a scientist at Arcus Biosciences. We miss them all dearly!

– Our R01 grant application on Shigella was funded and we are now excited to pursue our work on this fascinating and important human pathogen. Our collaborative P01 application (with Sarah Stanley, Jeff Cox and Dan Portnoy (PI)) received a good score and we anxiously await the Notice of Award. This P01 is now largely focused on M. tuberculosis, the major interest of Dmitri and Marian in the lab.

– Katie took advantage of her diminished time in lab during the pandemic to write a terrific review in Nature Immunology on inflammasomes and adaptive immunity. I encourage you to take a look!

– Patrick, Justin, Elizabeth, and Roberto (along with collaborators including the Lesser and Rauch Labs) published the lab’s first Shigella paper in eLife. Justin is now busily following up on this work, with help from our current rotation student, Janet Babirye.

– Our lab manager Peter has been accepted to the MCB PhD program at the University of Washington and plans to attend in the Fall. Congrats Peter!