At the University of Pennsylvania Biology Department Retreat, Run Jin was awarded $300 for her spectacular poster titled “Identification of LEAFY, a plant transcription factor that determines floral cell fate, as pioneer transcription factor in Arabidopsis thaliana.” She used a portion of her prize winnings to buy the lab donuts which makes us very pleased.
Dr. Doris Wagner spoke to students about Epigenetics in plants at the Friends Central High School Biology in a lab class taught by Dr. Sonia Chin.
A new school year and new age for Dr. Yang Zhu! Happy Birthday Yang! We hope this is the best year yet.
Thankful for his hard work and positive energy inside and outside the lab, the members of the Wagner lab feel bitter sweet as Dr. Jun Xiao moves forward in his career. Dr. Jun Xiao is moving to Beijing to be an independent Principle Investigator in the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences where he will lead his own research on plant molecular biology. For more information on the Xiao lab, please visit http://sourcedb.genetics.cas.cn/zw/zjrck/201805/t20180522_5015314.html.
https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/over-river-through-woods-and-down-34th-street-video
Wagner and biking go way back. “I grew up in a very small town in rural Germany close to the French border,” she says. “My family’s weekend outings consisted of bike rides together in the German and French countryside. I loved those rides.” She’s always seen biking as a combination of pleasurable and practical. “When I was little, not that many people had cars. Many did their shopping on bikes very similar to the Dutch cargo bike I now use for my short commute to Penn. This is where my love for these heavy but versatile bikes came from.” These days, Wagner commutes from Rittenhouse Square and enjoys when academic conferences take her to bike-friendly cities—favorites have been Gyeongju and Jeju Island, South Korea, and Valencia, Spain.
Dean Steven Fluharty announced the appointment of Doris Wagner as the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology. The appointment recognizes Dr. Wagner’s “distinguished scholarship and outstanding service to the Department and School of Arts and Sciences.” Dr. Wagner has published more than 60 papers on the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of changes in cell identity and function. Her recent work includes a hormone switch that couples and regulates the duration of two successive stages in the path to reproductive competence in plants, identifying a chromatin-remodeling complex that contributes to auxin regulated flower development and the first demonstration of a DNA-sequence based mechanism for Polycomb recruitment in Arabidopsis and has been published in Science, eLife and Nature Genetics. She is an elected member and now president of the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, has led an international initiative to promote plant epigenetics and epigenomics (EPIC) and has organized a number of workshops and symposia on plant development and epigenetics. Dr. Wagner served as Graduate Chair of Biology, 2008-2009 and 2011-2014. She is currently a member of the University’s Graduate Council.
Balancing work and life can sometimes be a balancing act, but Run, Sammy, and Yang were able to take the LOVE Run by storm. Meanwhile we also celebrated life inside the lab with cakes to celebrate Sammy’s and Run’s birthday.
The Wagner Lab had a lot to celebrate this evening. We have two brilliant rotation students Wil Prall and Abby Divito. In November, Dr. Jianqiang Shen joined our lab. Dr. Jun Xiao is opening his own lab in China. Dr. Yuhee Chung and her husband welcomed Abigail Kang to their family last August, and Dr. Jun Xiao and his wife welcomed Scarlett Xiao to theirs early this month! In light of these blessings, Dr. Doris Wagner and her husband, Dr. John Wagner, invited us into their home for a delicious dinner.
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