PREP@UCD scholars and three talented undergrads celebrated successful completion of their GRFP proposals with lunch, courtesy of the UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

And now we wait....and prepare posters for an in-house symposium...and visit the PREP site at UC Santa Cruz...and apply to PhD programs...and do research...and more research...etc.

No, the PREP scholars aren't running away...they (and Brandon Reyes-Chaves, a stellar undergrad from the Juliano lab) joined the UC Davis MCB T32 training program retreat at Fallen Leaf Lake. Stay tuned for updates, including the answer to the question: who will finally wrest the Polar Bear Swim Chicken Trophy out of Dan Starr's hands?

PREP@UCD alumna Alyssa Papapella spoke to ASBMB Today, the magazine for members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, about her experiences as a scientist with invisible disabilities. Alyssa joined PREP and Dan Starr's lab after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She's now is a PhD student and NSF GRFP fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Hey look, it's our alumni!

Thanks to Greg Watry from the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences for writing a nice profile.

The 2021 edition of The College Tour features UC Davis! 

UC Davis and the city of Davis worked together throughout summer 2020 and thereafter to create a model for limiting the spread of COVID-19 in our community. The resulting program, Healthy Davis Together, has been lauded as a glimpse into the future of public health. Read about the program, its inception and implementation, and its outcomes.

UC Davis' Office of Graduate Studies has announced the inaugural cohort for the Faculty Academy of Graduate Student Well-Being. 

Check out today's Thursday Thoughts video by UC Davis Chancellor May and Leshelle May. They describe the new Graduate Center at Walker Hall, their graduate school experiences, UC Davis and fall reopening, and...fashion.

Dan Starr and Gant Luxton are hiring! Starr and Luxton run a joint lab funded by an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award.

Research aspects of this job will be using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to engineer mammalian tissue culture lines to test how LINC complexes and the cytoskeleton interact to regulate the biomechanics of the cell. Cell culture transfection, immunostaining, genome editing, live microscopy, and biophysical assays will be the primary approaches. 

Congratulations to PREP@UC Davis scholar Brayan, whose undergraduate work on the gut microbiome just appeared. Brayan and his colleagues studied the relationship between the consumption of soy and dairy products, and gut microflora in healthy equol (a bacterial metabolite implicated in increased incidence of breast cancer) and non-equol producing Puerto Rican women. Women in their study who consume soy and high amounts of dairy products had a less diverse microbiome, leading to increased production of equol.

I used to hate writing. I still do somewhat. In high school, English was consistently my worst subject. Coincidentally, it was the subject with the most amount of writing. But at the end of my junior year, I was given an assignment that changed my outlook on writing. I had to emulate the tone of a short story with personal stories. While writing this particular essay, I had an epiphany: write in a way that I stayed interested. I realized that I hated writing because I hated the way I wrote. So, I changed. I wrote like I thought. Short sentences with no verbs.

Read all about Jamal Lewis, a faculty member in biomedical engineering and mentor to PREP@UCD scholar Arthur Flores (2020-2021 cohort), in this wonderful profile from the University of Florida.

"Lewis, 36, is at the vanguard of immunoengineering, designing microscopic but powerful biotechnologies that stop relentless “big trucks” in their tracks." -- Barbara Drake, UF

Congratulations to Yana, Sean, Ivan, and other coauthors for a nice paper!

Blokhina, Y. et al, 2021. Rad21l1 cohesin subunit is dispensable for spermatogenesis but not oogenesis in zebrafish, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1009127

The PREP site at the University of Georgia unexpectedly has an opening. Program starts on 15 July.

The University of Georgia (UGA) has one of the strongest and most diverse programs in infectious disease research and training in the US. 

Contact [email protected] for more info.

Join us, Thursday 17 June, 3:00-5:00pm PDT, for research talks by our scholars. We are so excited!

https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/93719483711?pwd=M05RaGRqVEFiWHdjMzh4RkI5TFRzUT09

ARCHIVAL LISTING of schedule and titles with zoom screen array of faces