Sara Woessner (PhD student in the CCB) joins the lab!
The lab was busy this past year! We currently have a lot of exciting research wrapping up and excited to share with you soon. Some personnel updates:
Congrats to Yifei Hu, who successfully defended his doctoral thesis on CAR-T cell detection and differentiation!
Bittersweet goodbyes to undergraduates Annie and Carl! An especially big congrats to Carl who successfully completed his undergraduate thesis on modifying CAR-T culture conditions to improve function.
After being a part of the lab since its very early times, Xiaodan has completed her postdoc and is moving home. We’ll miss you!
If you are a graduate student (or prospective graduate student) interested in CAR-T cell engineering and/or biology - reach out to us via the contact form! We’re interested in you and would love to talk about our ongoing projects and how you may fit in.
Min, Jill, and Xiaolei’s COVID research paper was published on Matter and was highlighted by UChicago News, Science Daily, EurekAleret, News-Medical, CBS Chicago(with video), WGN9-TV(with video), Fox-32(with video), Chicago Crusader, Phys.org, the Engineer, Technology Networks, Health Europa, Santélog, Newswise, AzoNano, Sciencenet.
Congrats to Dr. Jill Rosenberg and Dr. Daniel Cao for their successful thesis defenses.
Dr. Cao defended his thesis on T cell and CAR T cell differentiation on April 29th.
Dr. Rosenberg defended her thesis, entitled “Revealing T-Cell Signaling States by Lattice Light-Sheet Microscopy of 4-D Receptor Dynamics:, on April 30th.
Welcome to Thao and Erting, who both joined the lab this fall as PME PhD students.
Jill was awarded the Mary Ellen Conellan Scholarship from the University of Chicago Cancer Center Research Foundation. Ms. Connellan was a long-time executive director of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Foundation and had a steadfast commitment to the University of Chicago’s cancer research community, including its trainees. This award, established in her honor when she retired in 2017, recognizes students with exceptional promise and provides additional training support to help them succeed.
Two of the Huang lab’s projects were recently featured in the news!
Jill, Daniel, and Fernanda’s paper on LLSM analysis was featured in PME News. Read more about it here.
Dr. Nick Ankenbruck’s collaboration with Junhong Chen’s research group to design a handheld test for COVID-19 was featured in UChicago News. Read more about it here.
We’ve been busy (as you can see by the lack of posts). Some highlights:
Yifei and Nick both passed their qualifying exams for PhD candidacy
Jill, Daniel, and Fernanda published some of their research on T cell synapse formation in Cell Systems. Check it out here.
Laura was accepted to UChicago’s UTEP teaching school
Devin was awarded the Harper Award!
When it’s safe, we’re ready to get back in the lab! More news to come.
This summer has been a busy one at the lab - Doremi left for graduate school, Ashima finished her internship, and we had 6 summer students conducting research!
Welcome Ashima! Coming from U.Toledo, she’ll be working in the lab for four months as part of an internship.
Welcome Nick and Yifei who are both joining the lab after their rotations!
We were lucky to have two awesome high school students conduct research with us over the summer. Janelle (mentored by Jill) is now at Mizzou. You can read more about her experience here. Spencer (mentored by Chufan) won the top prize at his program’s poster session. Read more about the program he participated in here.
The lab recieved a DP2 grant for “Molecular Mechanism of Natural Killer Cell Recognition.” Starting September 2018, this grant will allow us to probe further into the mechanisms of NK cell activation and inhibition. Read more about it here.
Congratulations to Jill and Andrés for receiving NSF fellowships for their graduate studies! Their GRFPs will start this year.