Congratulations to PREP@UCD scholars Arielle Hancko and Johnny Vertiz for being awarded NSF GRFPS! And PREP@UCD alum Brayan Vilanova, now at Cornell, received one too!

And alums Brandy Weathers (USC) and Kaitlynn Gov (UT Southwestern) received honorable mentions!

We're so proud of ALL of our PREP scholars and alums -- they've learned so much and we look forward to seeing all that they do in their careers.

10 April addition

PREP@UCD alum Tianna Grant gave a virtual seminar to students at her alma mater, St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. In true PREP style, she included spoke about her journey from her undergraduate coursework, through her postbacc, to her graduate research on T cells and their receptors.

Tianna's discovery of bioinformatics in the LaSalle lab launched her into the Jimmy Ye lab and ImmunoX Computional Biology Initiative at UCSF.

Thanks for giving back to your alma mater, Tianna!

PREP@UCD alum Amy Leslie received one of two 2022-2023 travel awards from the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. Amy, a doctoral candidate in Integrative Pathobiology and mentee of Dr. Allen Gao, will use her award to support attending a cancer-relevant meeting in 2023.

Congrats to Amy!

Colton Baumler, a PREP@UC Davis alumnus and graduate student in UC Davis' Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology program, received the College of Biological Sciences Dean's Mentorship Award in Spring 2022.  What's more, the quiet, self-effacing, and publicity-shy Baumler was featured as part of an article on first generation college students in the Fall 2022 issue of a UC Davis publication, In Greater Focus.

Catching up on folks' accomplishments....

PREP scholar Kiya Jackson coauthored a book chapter with Professor Joanna Chiu and Chiu labbies Yao Cai and Sergio Sotelo. Their work describes an assay based on circadian locomotor activity in Drosophila melanogaster that can be used with mutant screens and mechanistic studies to identify and characterize key molecular components of the circadian clock.

Congratulations, Kiya! 

A week ago, we bid farewell to the 2021-2022 PREP@UC Davis cohort and undergrad affiliates. They all did a wonderful job presenting their research in the PREP@UC Davis research symposium. After a dinner with a mentors and a few days of R&R, they're off to their new graduate programs.

Forewarned is forearmed.

We invited current UC Davis grad students Arthur Flores (Immunology), Celena Lozano (Neuroscience), and Maribel Anguiano (Neuroscience) to talk with our current cohort of PREP@UCD scholars about their first year as grad students. 

The scholars peppered them with questions in our hour-long discussion.

The 2021-2022 Cohort of PREP@UCD scholars and affiliates are making have made decisions about grad school! They have worked hard and their mentors have provided tremendous support.

We are SO excited and proud of them.

PREP affiliate Kaitlyn Abe and the Letts lab at UC Davis used biochemical and structural principles to explain the phenotypes of several mutants of proteins that edit RNA in respiratory complexes. Their work recently appeared in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences: Maldonado, Abe, and Letts, A structural perspective on RNA editing of plant respiratory complexes, IJMS 2022, 23(2), 684.

Congratulations to all!