News | Rhoades Lab

Lab News:

January 2024 – Chemistry graduate students Bernard and Ibrahim officially join the lab as co-advised students with the Petersson lab. Welcome Bernard and Ibrahim!
December 2023 – Jenny, Emily, and Polina attend the annual BMB Retreat, with Jenny and Emily presenting posters.
November 2023 – Chemistry graduate students Abe Eafa and Bernard Abakah join us for a rotation.
October 2023 – The Rhoades and Petersson labs go apple picking and have a BBQ afterwards; check out our new lab photo at the orchard!
September 2023 – Chemistry graduate students Ibrahim Saleh and Andy Saks join us for a rotation.
August 2023 – The Rhoades lab has its 1st annual day of science retreat, with a hike and happy hour at Wissahickon.
August 2023 – Ritobrita Chakraborty joins the lab as a post-doc; welcome Ritobrita!
July 2023 – Polina was appointed to the Structural Biology Training grant; way to go Polina!
April 2023 – Polina successfully passed her candidacy exam- congrats Polina!
April 2023 – Taylor received a departmental teaching award for general chemistry, congrats Taylor!
February 2023 – Jenny and Karen attend the BPS conference in San Diego, Jenny gave a poster and Karen gave a talk, way to go girls!
January 2023 – BMB graduate student Grace joins us for a rotation
January 2023 – Chemistry graduate students Olivia and Taylor join the lab- Welcome!
December 2022 – Jenny received a travel award from BPS- Way to go Jenny!
November 2022 – Lab alumnus Sanju’s paper with the Berger lab was published in JBC- Congrats!
June 2022 – Undergraduate students Amy and Maeve join the lab for the summer- Welcome!
June 2022 – Karen conducted outreach in Puerto Rico with the LRSM PREM program.
May 2022 – Emily successfully passed her candidacy exam- way to go Emily!
May 2022 – Jenny and Karen received travel awards from the Protein Society for their upcoming conference- way to go Jenny and Karen!
April 2022 – Nima received a postdoctoral fellowship award from the Alzheimer’s Association- way to go Nima!
April 2022 – Sanju left us for a job as a medical writer at Prescott Communications Group in Chicago- good luck and we will miss you!
April 2022 – Lab alumnus Buyan won the 2022 Professor John G. Miller Award for the best thesis in the Chemistry Department. Way to go Buyan!
January 2022 – Sanju successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Wickramasinghe!
December 2021 – Chemistry graduate student, Polina Holubovska, joins the lab- Welcome Polina!
December 2021 – Nuno leaves us to return to his research position in Lisboa Portugal- we will miss you Nuno!
October 2021 – Chemistry graduate student, Polina Holubovska, joins us for a rotation.
October 2021 – Chris Brue joined the lab as a post-doc; he comes from the Meade lab at Northwestern University. Welcome Chris!
October 2021 – Buyan left for her post-doc in the Rapoport lab at Harvard- good luck and we will miss you!
September 2021 – Chemistry graduate student, Bethann Flint, joins us for a rotation.
September 2021 – Fulbright Scholar Nuno Bernardes arrived in lab. He will be studying the role of cellular glycans in cancer using FCS.
July 2021 – Buyan successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Pan!
July 2021 – Chemistry graduate student, Emily Brackhahn, officially joined the lab.
July 2021 – Liz became co-director of the Vagelos Molecular Life Sciences Program.
June 2021 – We welcomed undergraduate Amy Wu to the lab to work on neurexin/alpha-synuclein interactions.
June 2021 – Buyan was selected to give a talk in the “Molecular Basis of
Proteinopathies” seminar series. Congratulations, Buyan!
May 2021 – Yifan graduated from Haverford. Way to go Yifan! He will be spending the
next year doing research in the lab of Fei Chen at the Broad Institute.
May 2021 – Karen’s paper with the Sachs lab at University of Minnesota
was accepted by npj Parkinson’s Disease.
May 2021 – Jenny was reappointed to the CBI training grant –
congratulations Jenny!
April 2021 – Chemistry graduate student Emily Brackhahn joined us for a
rotation.
April 2021 – Liz gave a talk in the “Experimental and Computational
Approaches in Unraveling Mechanisms of Amyloid Formation” session at the
ACS Meeting. Buyan gave a talk in the Organic Division.
April 2021 – Buyan’s paper on phosphorylated alpha-synuclein appeared in
ChemBioChem – yay Buyan!
February 2021 – Buyan presented a poster at the Biophysical Society Virtual Annual Meeting.
January 2021 – Liz gave a talk in the “Molecular Basis of
Proteinopathies” seminar series.
January 2021 – We welcome BMB graduate student Christina Hurley for a
virtual research rotation.
December 2020 – Buyan’s paper on glutamate arginylation of
alpha-synuclein was published in JACS.
December 2020 – Melissa left us to start her Group Leader position at
the Max Delbruck Institute of Molecular Medicine. Good luck, Melissa and
we’ll miss you!
July 2020 – Liz has been promoted to Full Professor! Her promotion has been formally approved by the University. Congratulations, Liz!
June 2020 – We welcome BMB first year student Emily Pillet for a rotation.
June 2020 – We are beginning to emerge from the shutdown and found that
all our lasers are still working!
June 2020 – Isabel presented a poster at the virtual EMBL Symposia
‘Microtubules: From Atoms to Complex Systems’
June 2020 – Haverford undergraduate Yifan Zhang joined the lab (remotely!).
June 2020 – Congratulations to Jenny for earning a spot on the Chemical
Biology Training Grant!
May 2020 – Jenny passed her candidacy exam – way to go, Jenny!
March 2020 – We welcomed postdoc Nima Naseri from Manu Sharma’s lab at
Weill Cornell to the group! (Then the lab shut-down, but we don’t blame
Nima)
March 2020 – Buyan’s paper appeared in ACS Chemical Biology – yay, Buyan!
Feburary 2020 – Kristen successfully defended her PhD thesis (only a
week before her wedding!) – congratulations, Dr. McKibben!
January 2020 – Liz gave at talk at the GRC on “Protein Folding Dynamics”
in Galveston – don’t mess with Texas!
January 2020 – BMB graduate student Roseanne Davila-Rivera joined us for
research rotation – welcome Roseanne!
January 2020 – Undergraduate Will Shafer joined the lab – welcome Will!
December 2019 – Congratulations to lab alum, Joyce, and current lab members Kristen and Jenny on their paper accepted at Structure.
November 2019 – Congratulations to Kristen on her paper on tau’s proline rich region and N-terminal domain accepted at Journal of Biological Chemistry!
September 2019 – We say goodbye to postdoc Jonathan – good luck in North Carolina!
August 2019 – Sanju’s paper on tau aggregation by polyphosphate with the Jakob lab came out in Biophysical Journal.
July 2019 – Jenny Ramirez joins the lab as a joint student with the Petersson lab. Welcome, Jenny!
July 2019 – Buyan’s paper on the structure and mechanism of NatA/Naa50 with the Marmorstein lab came out in Structure.
June 2019 – Liz gave talks at the GRC on Proteins and the FASEB meeting on Protein Aggregation.
June 2019 – Buyan presented a poster at the American Peptide Society meeting and won a Peptide Science Poster Award. Read her feature on the APS website: »
May 2019 – Congratulations to Melissa for her paper on alpha-synuclein and N-linked glycans being accepted at PLoS Biology!
May 2019 – Liz gave a keynote address at the Chesapeake Bay Single Molecule Meeting at the Janelia Research Campus.
May 2019 – We say good-bye to Adriana. We are delighted she will be returning to UPenn as a PhD student this summer!
May 2019 – Buyan presented a poster at the NYAS Chemical Biology Meeting and won a poster prize. Congratulations, Buyan!
May 2019 – Congratulations to Isabel on passing her candidacy exam!
March 2019 – Sanju, Karen, Buyan, Joyce and Jonathan presented posters at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore. Kristen gave a platform talk and Liz gave a talk in the Awards Symposium.
February 2019 – We welcome Mushu, our new TIRF microscope, to the laser lab! We hope you and Wall-E get along and we look forward to working with you, Mushu!
January 2019 – Buyan’s collaborative paper on alpha-synuclein with the Ischiropolous lab was published in Scientific Reports.
December 2018 – Liz’s volume of Methods in Enzymology on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins came out.
July 2018 – We welcome new lab member, Isabel, to the group and congratulate her for being selected as a trainee on the Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics Training grant. Way to go, Isabel!
July 2018 – We welcome Adriana Naomi Santiago-Ruiz, a post-bacc student from the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, to the lab.
June 2018 – Jonathan Musila from the Ellis Lab at Auburn University and the Rokita Lab at Johns Hopkins University joins us as a postdoc – welcome Jonathan!
June 2018 – We received a grant from the Michael J. Fox foundation to study the interaction of alpha-synculein with extracellular glycans.
May 2018 – We say good-bye to undergraduates Richard (Roger) and Hope – best of luck in your next steps!
May 2018 – Karen passed her prelims – way to go, Karen!
April 2018 – Liz gave a talk at the ASBMB Annual Meeting in San Diego
April 2018 – Melissa’s paper on IAPP came out in Nature Communications. Congratulations Melissa!
April 2018 – Joyce and Melissa’s paper on IDPs in macromolecular complexes appears in Current Opinion in Structural Biology.
February 2018 – Karen, Buyan and Kristen all presented posters at the Biophysical Society Annual meeting in San Francisco. Sanju gave a platform talk.
January 2018 – Buyan’s co-author paper with the Petersson Lab (and with lab alumnus Abhi Nath) is in print in the Biophysical Journal. Congratulations Buyan!
January 2018 – We welcome BMB rotation students Isabel Yannatos and Faviolla Báez Cruz to the lab.
December 2017 – Melissa Birol presented a poster at the American Society for Cell Biology Meeting in Philadelphia.
July 2017 – We welcome postdoc Joyce Fung to the Rhoades lab. She comes from Yuh Min Chook’s lab at UT Southwestern where she used x-ray crystallography to study cargo recognition relevant to nuclear export.
June 2017 – Goodbye to Xiaohan! He is off to England to begin a post-doc in the Babu lab at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. We will miss you, Xiaohan!
June 2017 – We welcome new BMB graduate student, Karen Acosta, and congratulate her on receiving a Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics Training Grant slot!
May 2017 – Buyan presented a poster at the NYAS Chemical Biology Meeting and won a poster prize. Congratulations, Buyan!
May 2017 – Congratulations to Hope Merens! She is one of the Vagelos Science Challenge Award Winners for 2017-2018!
May 2017 – We welcome undergraduate CEMB researcher Richard Potter to the lab!
May 2017 – Congratulations to Xiaohan Li on successfully defending his thesis!
April 2017 – Sanju passed prelims; Buyan passed candidacy – congratulations to them both!
Feb 2017 – Members of the Rhoades lab presented posters (Siobhan Toal, Xiaohan Li, and Melissa Birol) and a talk (Ana Melo) at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
January 2017 – Liz became the Associate Editor of the Proteins section of the Biophysical Journal.
January 2017 – We welcome BMB rotation students Karen Acosta and Olivia Dickens to the lab.
October 2016 – We welcome Chemistry rotation student Sunbin Deng to the lab.
September 2016 – We welcome BMB rotation student Charlotte Fare to the lab.
August 2016 – We welcome post-doc Melissa BIrol in her move from New Haven to Philadelphia.
August 2016 – We say goodby toe Quinn and Lina – it was great having you in the lab on Team Tau for the summer!
July 2016 – Liz gave a talk and Melissa presented a poster at the FASEB Meeting on Protein Folding in the Cell. It was a fantastic meeting (even with lots of gels and chaperones).
July 2016 – We received an R01 from the NIH to study tau in relation to Alzheimer’s disease, a collaboration with the Odde and Sachs labs at the University of Minnesota.
July 2016 – Emily passes her candidacy exam – congratulations Emily!
July 2016 – Emily passes her candidacy exam – congratulations Emily!
June 2016 – We say farewell to Dong as he begins a position at China Agricultural University in Beijing. Good luck Dong!
June 2016 – Ana, Xiaohan, and Liz attended the GRS/GRC on Intrinsically disordered proteins in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. Liz was elected co-Chair of the 2020 meeting!
June 2016 – We welcome high school student Quinn Marks and high school teacher Lina Bader to the lab.
June 2016 – Kristen earned a slot on the Chemical Biology Training grant. Congratulations Kristen!
June 2016 – We welcome BMB graduate students Sanju Wickramasinghe and Kristen McKibben to the lab.
April 2016 – We welcome BMB rotation student, Sanju Wickiramasinghe!
March 2016 – Lauren Ann leaves the lab to begin a postdoc in John Brigg’s lab at EMBL. Good luck, Lauren Ann!
Feb 2016 – Members of the Rhoades lab presented two posters (Siobhan and Xiaohan) and one talk (Ana) at the 60th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Los Angeles, LA.
Jan 2016 – Lauren Ann successfully defended her thesis – Congratulations Dr. Metskas!
Dec 2015 – Chemistry graduate student Buyan Pan joined the group as a joint student with the Petersson group – welcome Buyan!
November 2015 – Xiaohan gave a talk a the 2015 Chemical Biophysics Mini-Symposium
August 2015 – BMB graduate student Emily Mattes joined the group – welcome Emily!
June 2015 – Hello Philadelphia! The lab is now located at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jan 2015 – Congratulations to Dr. Joanna Dunn, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation!
Dec 2014 – David successfully defended his thesis – congratulations to Dr. DeWitt!
Nov 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Siobhan Toal.
Oct 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Melissa Birol.
May 2015 – The lab is going to move to Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania.
Apr 2015 – Graduate student David DeWitt will begin a position as a equipment manager at Washington State University in April 2015- congratulations to David!
Feb 2015 – Members of the Rhoades lab presented three posters (Ana, Juli and Siobhan) and two talks (Lauren Ann and Xiaohan) at the 59th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore, MD.
Jan 2015 – Congratulations to Dr. Joanna Dunn, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation!
Dec 2014 – David successfully defended his thesis – congratulations to Dr. DeWitt!
Nov 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Siobhan Toal.
Oct 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Melissa Birol.
July 2014 – Congratulations to summer visiting student Jacob whose poster was awarded by Sackler undergraduate summmer research program!
July 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Dong Yang.
May 2014 – The lab welcomes Jacob Culver who is visiting from Ball State University for the summer.
May 2014 – Garrett successfully defended his thesis – congratulations to Dr. Cobb!
March 2014 – Congratulations to Garrett, Xiaohan, and alumnae Shani and Jocelyn on the acceptance of their mansucript “Tau mutants bind tubulin heterodimers with enhanced affinity” at PNAS.
February 2014 – The lab welcomes new post-doc Ana Melo.
September 2013 – Post-doc Rosemarie Vithayathil will begin a position as a clinical faculty member at Washington State University in January 2014 – congratulations to Rosemarie!
July 2013 – Congratulations to graduate student Lauren Ann Metskas for receiving an American Heart Association fellowship.
May 2013 – Post-doc Abhi Nath has accepted a tenure track position as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Washington. Congratulations, Abhi!
May 2013 – The Rhoades lab welcomes new graduate students Xiaohan Li and Michael Lacy!
Feb 2013 – Vanessa Ducas successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on Feb 22 – congratulations, Dr. Ducas!
Feb 2013 – Congratulations to Dr. Adam Trexler, who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on Feb 15!
Feb 2013 – Several members of the Rhoades lab presented their work at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society (Philadelphia, PA, Feb 2-6).
Feb 2013 – The Rhoades and Miranker labs welcome a new member – joint postdoc Dr. Rosemarie Vithayathil, formerly of the University of California, Irvine!
Aug 2012 – Abhi Nath presented a Young Investigator talk at the 26th Annual Symposium of the Protein Society (San Diego, CA, Aug 5-8) on developing new small-modulators of IAPP membrane-binding and toxicity.
Aug 2012 – Adam Trexler spoke at the “Protein Folding in the Cell” FASEB Science Research Conference (Saxtons River, VT, July 29-Aug 3) on the properties of α-synuclein in the cytoplasm and other crowded environments.
May 2012 – Adam Trexler spoke at the CMB Training Grant Symposium on May 11, on the native state of α-synuclein in solution and in cells.
Apr 2012 – David DeWitt described his work on the effect of α-synuclein on vesicle fusion at Biophysics Club on April 27.
Mar 2012 – Congratulations to Dr. Shani Elbaum-Garfinkle, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, “Single molecule investigations into Tau conformations and aggregation mechanisms: implications for Alzheimer’s disease,” on March 6!
Dec 2011 – Abhi Nath described the computational identification of small-molecule modulators of IAPP toxicity, an ongoing collaboration with the Miranker lab, at the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Discussion Group on Dec 16.
Abhi Nath presented FCS and fluorescence lifetime studies of the conformational and functional heterogeneity in enzyme-substrate complexes at the National Fluorescence Workshop in New Delhi, India.
Abhi Nath described the use of single-molecule fluorescence to study unstructured proteins at Frontiers in Optics 2011, in San Jose, CA.
Liz Rhoades has been promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry.
MB&B grad student Lauren Ann Metskas will be joining the Rhoades lab, working on a joint project with the Mochrie lab (Yale Physics). Welcome, Lauren Ann!
The Rhoades lab welcomes new members — undergraduates Tara Holder and Alan Chou will be performing research in New Haven over the summer.
Prof. Rhoades presented recent findings on the effects of oxidative modifications on α-synuclein membrane binding at the IX European Symposium of the Protein Society, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Garrett Cobb described the use of FCS to study protein-protein interactions in live zebrafish embryos, an ongoing collaboration with the Holley lab (Yale MCDB), at the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Discussion Group on May 20.
Liz Middleton successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Characterization, regulation and implications of α-synuclein membrane interactions,” on May 10. Congratulations, Dr. Middleton!
Members of the Rhoades lab presented three posters and four talks at the 55th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore, MD, and Liz Middleton won the SRAA Poster Award in the Intrinsically Disordered Proteins category.