Lab News
Needle in a haystack? Yes please… This is what Heejung said when she joined the lab as a freshman ~4 years ago. The manuscript describing her work is published with support from the team including but not limited to the unflappable Kerim Heber and Susan Tian. Read it at mBio.
Synthetic microbial communities are gaining traction in the gut microbiome space to do cutting edge mechanistic research… but how does one go about designing them and how could they be used in the clinic? Min Soo Kim answers these questions in his review in Gut Microbes.
For over 20 years, the Highly Cited Researchers program has used citation metrics and other indicators to identify influential researchers across the world based on their last 11 years of publishing. This year Jordan makes his first appearance on the list which also includes frequent collaborator Andrew Patterson and fellow One Health Microbiome Center member Francisco Dini-Andreote. Read more and see the list here.
This week Susan successfully defended her PhD becoming our first graduate setting a high bar for others to follow! Watch for what she does next as she moves on to an exciting post doc!
Thanks to the work of the lab and a network of amazing collaborators, Jordan has been awarded the 2026 American Society Award for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research. Read more about it and the other awardees on the ASM website.
Kerim, Heejung, and Aviauna are all leaving us for greener pastures. Kerim will be attending UPenn in the Genomics and Computational Biology PhD Program. Heejung will be attending UPenn in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, and Aviauna will be joining the work force on her path to becoming a medical lab scientist. Congrats all!
Shane has been appointed to the inaugural cohort of PSU’s new T32 training program supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Read more about the BIOMS T32 here.
Who said undergraduates can’t have their own projects? Kerim’s first author paper featuring many members of the lab is out this week in Bioinformatics. StrainR2 is a highly efficient tool for quantifying microbes at the strain level in synthetic microbial communities. Read it here.
After a long wait, Min Soo has been awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Congrats Min Soo!
Susan’s valiant effort to design and then deconstruct a synthetic microbiota to inhibit C. difficile is out this month in Cell Host & Microbe. Read more about it at the Scientist.