Spotlights

Dr. Katrina Forest was named a 2012 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Faculty Fellow. Dr. Forest was chosen for her excellence in teaching, mentorship, and the dedication to passing knowledge and skills to her students. Congratulations to Dr. Forest on this momentous honor.

Congratulations to Dr. Ed Chapman on his Kellett Mid-Career Award! Dr. Chapman has received this award in honor of his work providing insights into the molecular mechanisms that underlie secretory vesicle exocytosis, snaptic transmission and plasticity, and vesicle recycling in neurons.

 

Congratulations to alumnus Dr. Timothy Jackson! Dr. Jackson, a former trainee from the Brunold lab, has secured an Assistant Professor position in the chemistry department at the University Kansas. After graduating from UW-Madison, Dr. Jackson received a NIH Post-doctoral fellowship in the chemistry department at the University of Minnesota.

Martin Zanni's lab and their work with lasers in the study of Type II diabetes is currently being featured on UW-Madison's homepage. The page features a great video on their lab. Check it out!
For the feature on the homepage visit: UW-Madison's homepage or their YouTube video

Dr. Tim Cordes, an alumnus of the Biophysics Training Grant Program in the Forest Lab, received an MD/PhD degree from UW-Madison and is currently a resident in psychiatry at the UW-Madison Hospital and Clinic.  Cordes, who has been blind since childhood, wrote a computer program creatively called Tonal Interface for MacroMolecules (TiMMol) that replicates 3D images using a range of audio tones and spatial cues, allowing proteins to be visualized via sound.  This past June, Dr. Cordes relayed his journey in a keynote presentation at a CIC Accessibility Conference called, "How I See I.T."

To view the video visit: Here

Congratulations to Raashi Sreenivasan, a Biophysics graduate student in Record lab, for being selected as one of the students to represent University of Wisconsin-Madison in the competition for HHMI's International Student Fellowship.

The new three-year HHMI fellowship program provides support for international student's in their third, fourth and fifth years of a Ph.D. program who are studying in the United States and are ineligible for training grants and fellowships through U.S. federal agencies.

Project CRYSTAL, housed in Biophysics trainer Hazel Holden's lab, is an innovative program for Middle School students which brings science minded students into a lab setting and allows them to get hands on experience with graduate level research.  Project Crystal hopes to both foster interest in the field of science and chemistry as well as lead to healthy life choices by learning the inner workings of nutrition. 

For more information, visit their website where you can see their research and watch an interesting video on their work: www.projectcrystal.org/index.html

Rayna Addabbo, a Biophysics graduate student in the Silvia Cavagnero lab, has been awarded an NSF fellowship.

Rayna's current research in Dr. Cavagnero's lab focues on cotranslational protein folding studies using fluorescence.

Congratulations to Rayna on this fantastic honor.

Dr. Meyer Jackson, Chair of the Biophysics Degree Program and professor of neuroscience was awarded the Kenneth S. Cole award by the Biophysical Society. The prestigious award is given annually to an investigator who has made substantial contributions to understanding cell membrane biophysics. He will be presented with his award in February at the 56th annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in San Diego.

Dr. Jackson and his group focuses on how neurotransmitter-filled vesicles inside synapses fuse with the cell membrane and how the entry of calcium triggers membrane fusion. They also study the nerve circuits that surround synapses.