Our Latest

Dr. Edgar Medina has been awarded one of the eight 2024 Dr. Eddie Méndez Scholar Award from The Fred Hutch Cancer Center! 

The Dr. Eddie Méndez Scholar Award recognizes early-career underrepresented minority scientists and scientists with disabilities. Named for Dr. Eddie Méndez, a head and neck cancer expert and cherished colleague at Fred Hutch who died of cancer in 2018, the award was created in his honor...

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NSF CAREER Funded!

We are very pleased that our NSF CAREER award on the developmental response of frog-killing chytrid fungi to amphibian mucus has been funded! We are so excited for the discoveries that will be made possible by this support. You can find out more about...

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NIH R35 MIRA funded

We look forward to five years of support for work related to the evolution and specification of the actin cytoskeleton. Thank you NIGMS for this flexible funding! For more information, see the relevant entry in the NIH REPORTER.

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Postdoc Dr. Edgar Medina awarded HHMI Hanna Gray fellowship

Dr. Edgar Medina has been awarded a Hanna Gray fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to support his postdoctoral work as well as his future independent research. You can read more about Edgar’s fellowship in this article from the UMass press office, and...

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Research on actin networks of the “frog-killing fungus” Bd is published in Current Biology.

Sarah Prostak, Kristyn Robinson, along with Margart Titus from the University of Minnesota have published their work “The actin networks of chytrid fungi reveal evolutionary loss of cytoskeletal complexity in the fungal kingdom” in Current Biology (you can read the paper here!).  First author...

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Postdoc Andrew Kennard joins the lab!

The lab is thrilled to welcome Andrew Kennard, Ph.D as our newest postdoc! Andrew earned his Masters of philosophy in Physics at the University of Cambridge and received his Ph.D in Biophysics from Stanford University from the lab of Dr. Julie Theriot where he...

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Research on Naegleria’s actin-based, microtubule-independent motility published in the Journal of Cell Biology.

Dr. Katrina Velle has published her fascinating work on Naegleria gruberi’s crawling motility in a paper “Conserved actin machinery drives microtubule-independent motility and phagocytosis in Naegleria” in the Journal of Cell Biology. Lacking interphase microtubules as an amoeba, N. gruberi, related to the “brain-eating...

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Guide to growing Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms

“Isolation and maintenance of Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans cultures” is now published in Diseases of Aquatic Organisms. Here’s the abstract: Discovered in 2013, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) is an emerging amphibian pathogen that causes ulcerative skin lesions and multifocal erosion. A closely related pathogen, B. dendrobatidis (Bd), has devastated amphibian...

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Essay on the evolution of animal cell motility published in Current Biology

“The evolution of animal cell motility” is now published in Current Biology. Here’s the abstract: Eukaryotic cells use a number of diverse mechanisms to swim through liquid or crawl across solid surfaces. The two most prevalent forms of eukaryotic cell motility are flagellar-dependent swimming...

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