News

Congratulations to Saurin Parikh from Dr. Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Leveraging the genotype-phenotype relationship to understand the traditional and novel facets of cell biology." Saurin has accepted a position as a Technology Licensing Associate at UR Ventures, University of Rochester. 

Congratulations to Feng Shan from Dr. Dario Vignali's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Integrated BATF transcriptional network regulates suppressive intratumoral regulator T cells." Feng has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Alex Shalek's lab at MIT.

Congratulations to Dr. Ora Weisz who has recently received the Sandra K. Masur Senior Leadership Award from the American Society of Cell Biology. 

Congratulations to Osama Shiraz Shah from Drs. Steffi Oesterreich and Adrian Lee's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Multi-omic profiling of E-cadherin deficient breast cancers and their in-vitro models towards enabling precision medicine." Osama has accepted a position as an International Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Congratulations to ISB student, Nishant Panicker, from Dr. Erik Wright's lab, who has received the Center for Evolutionary Biology Medicine (CEBaM) Catalyst Award for 2023-24. 

Catalyst Award Program


Congratulations to Minwook Kim, from Dr. Donghun Shin's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "The Role of PPARα in Liver Progenitor Cell-Mediated Liver Regeneration." Minwook has accepted a position as a Postdoc in Dr.Sungjin Ko's lab in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Congratulations to Will Dion on receiving a F31 fellowship award.

Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) - Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (Parent F31) 

Awarded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 

Project title: "Nuclear speckle liquid-liquid phase separation dynamics in senescence and aging”

Congratulations to Carlos Guerrero from Dr. Graham Hatfull's lab who published a paper in Nature Microbiology as a co-first author. 

https://rdcu.be/c7a89

 

Congratulations to Daniel Lefever, from Dr. Lance Taylor's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "An application of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) to Repurpose Drugs for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD)." 

Congratulations to Tyler Fortuna, from Dr. Udai Pandey's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Identifying the molecular pathways perturbed by pathogenic mutations in GEMIN5." Tyler has accepted a position as a scientific project manager for the Gene Therapy Program at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Congratulations to Megan Yates, from Drs. Steffi Oesterreich and Adrian Lee's lab, who successfully defended her thesis titled: " Functional Characterizaton and Clinical Prevalence of ESR1 Fusions in Advanced Endocrine Resistant Breast Cancer." Megan is a MSTP student who will now return to finish medical school.

Congratulations to Dr. Arjumand Ghazi and her lab for their recent publication, "Don't mess with meiosis: Study suggests how reproductive health influences overall health and aging" in Aging Cell. 

https://apple.news/AHZM8JOG1TGmX_dpW46NixQ

 

 

Congratulations to Will Dion on receiving the highly competitive Diana Jacobs Kalman/AFAR Scholarships for Research in the Biology of Aging from American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). 

Congratulations to Kate Shipman, from Dr. Ora Weisz's lab, who successfully defended her thesis titled: "Modeling megalin traffic in the kidney proximal tubule to identify mechanisms of proteinuric disease."  Kate will stay in the Weisz Lab as a postdoctoral trainee , where she will continue to develop mathematical models of the endocytic pathway of proximal tubule under normal and disease conditions.

Congratulations to Kai Ding, from Drs. Steffi Oesterreich and Adrian Lee's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Multi-omics profiling of breast cancer metastases to identify drivers and mechanisms of endocrine resistance for precision medicine."  Kai has accepted a position at Takeda in Boston working on computational oncology. 

Congratulations to Sarah Munyoki, from Dr. Kyle Orwig's lab, who successfully defended her thesis titled: "Molecular Characterization of Human Spermatogonial Stem Cells."  Sarah has accepted a position as a postdoctoral associate at Magee Women's Research Institute researching the microbiome in pregnancy. 

Congratulations to Kylia Williams, from Dr. Cecilia Lo's lab, who successfully defended her thesis titled: "Ciliary genes contribute to a complex genetic model of congenital heart disease." Kylia has accepted a position as a Data Scientist at Oscar Health in New York City. 

 

Dr. Carvunis and lab receive the National Science Foundation CAREER award to study how the widespread translation of evolutionary novel sequences impacts physiology and fitness in yeast. The research will be integrated with a far reaching educational project in collaboration with Primarily Undergraduate Institutions across the United States.

"The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

 https://www.csb.pitt.edu/dr-carvunis-and-lab-receive-nsf-career-award/

 

Congratulations to Scott Ginebaugh, from Dr. Stephen Meriney's lab, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Short duration presynaptic action potentials shape calcium dynamics and transmitter release at the neuromuscular junction in healthy and diseased states." Scott has accepted a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the department of Medical Oncology. 

Congratulations to Andrew Clugston, from Drs. Jackie Ho and Dennis Kostka's labs, who successfully defended his thesis titled: "Regulation of RNA expression in nephron progenitor cells." Andrew has accepted a postdoc position at University of California San Francisco. 

Congratulations to Dr. Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis on being selected as a 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow for her work in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology! This fellowship is awarded to early-career researchers whose “achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders.”

See link for additional information. https://sloan.org/fellowships/2021-Fellows

 

Congratulations to Megan Yates on receiving a F30 fellowship award.

Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA for Individual Predoctoral MD/PhD Degree Fellows (F30), National Cancer Institute 

Title: Functional Characterization and Clinical Prevalence of ESR1 Fusions in Advanced Endocrine Resistant Breast Cancer

https://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9990043...

Congratulations to Sarah Munyoki on receiving the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development F31 research fellowship award titled 'High Resolution Transcriptome Analysis of the Primate Testis'. 

Congratulations to Tyler Fortuna who has been awarded with a Research Advisory Committee (RAC) pre-doctoral fellowship from the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The Pandey lab identified a novel genetic modifier of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13383-z

https://www.packardcenter.org/news-and-media/news/a-new-genetic-explanat...  

“Mutations in fused in sarcoma (FUS) lead to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with varying ages of onset, progression and severity. This suggests that unknown genetic factors contribute to disease pathogenesis. Here we show the identification of muscleblind as a novel modifier of FUS-mediated neurodegeneration in vivo. Muscleblind regulates cytoplasmic mislocalization of mutant FUS and subsequent accumulation in stress granules, dendritic morphology and toxicity in mammalian neuronal and human iPSC-derived neurons. Interestingly, genetic modulation of endogenous muscleblind was sufficient to restore survival motor neuron (SMN) protein localization in neurons expressing pathogenic mutations in FUS, suggesting a potential mode of suppression of FUS toxicity. Upregulation of SMN suppressed FUS toxicity in Drosophila and primary cortical neurons, indicating a link between FUS and SMN. Our data provide in vivo evidence that muscleblind is a dominant modifier of FUS-mediated neurodegeneration by regulating FUS-mediated ALS pathogenesis."

The Gao’s lab has recently reported the tumor suppressive role of arginine sensor CASTOR1 in oncogenic virus KSHV-induced cellular transformation and delineated a novel mechanism of mTORC1 activation in KSHV-induced cancer, providing a scientific basis for therapy.  

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/127166

The Integrative Systems Biology graduate program and the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine are offering a track in Evolutionary Medicine. Training in this specialization will give students the basis required to perform cutting-edge research - computational, experimental or both - in one of the many laboratories at Pitt that are pushing the boundaries of evolutionary medicine across topics including, but not limited to: cancer, immunology, microbiome, antibiotic resistance, comparative systems biology, infectious disease. Prospective graduate students interested in this topic are encouraged to apply to ISB!

ISB Application System

 

Congratulations to Dr. Steffi Oesterreich on receiving the 2019 William E. Brown Outstanding MSTP Mentor Award.

Congratulations to ISB graduate student, Kate Shipman, on recently receiving an F31 award entitled, "Megalin Traffic in Dent Disease."

Congratulations to Dr. Robin Lee and his lab on their recent publication in Nature Communications. 

Chemical perturbation of specific protein-protein interactions (PPI) is notoriously difficult, yet necessary when complete inhibition of a signaling pathway is detrimental to the cell. Here, the authors use a systems approach and identify two first in class small molecules that specifically inhibit TNF-induced NF-κB activation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08802-0

 

The Thomas and Gronenborn labs recently reported the mechanism by which insulin switches liver cell metabolism from fat burning to fat storage. Using a holistic approach—from the atom to the whole organism—they showed how insulin triggers PACS-2 to inhibit SIRT1 and provided new insight into how anti-obesity, sirtuin-activating compounds (STACs) may work. Congratulations to Dr. Gary Thomas and Angela Gronenborn.

Paper URL:

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1097276518308396?token=2E50AE...

Preview URL:

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1097276518310347?token=2F2BE6...

Congratulations to Dr. Adrian Lee who was the recipient of the Biomedical Graduate Student Association Distinguished Mentor Award at the 2018 BGSA Symposium. 

The ISB program is pleased to announce that we will no longer require GREs to be submitted as part of your application packet.  All ISB applicants will be judged on their GPA (especially courses within their major), research experience, and letters of recommendation. 

Congratulations to Dr. Anne Ruxandra Carvunis who has been selected as one of the 2018 recipients of the Searle Scholars Program Award. This award is made annually to only 15 exceptional young faculty in the country in biomedical science and chemistry considered most promising. The award recognizes faculty who have made important and innovative research contributions. 

At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Gary Thomas has engaged ISB students directly with world leaders in medicine and patient care. Clinical scientists introduce ISB students to biological systems—from the bedside to the bench (B2B)—and identify pressing needs awaiting solution by our next generation of researchers. This experience equips our PhD students with unique insight into biomedical research and how they can best contribute to understanding and curing human disease.  

See Pitt article on B2B!

 

The Institute for Precision Medicine uses systems biology research to understand the biology of disease and enable personalized healthcare. http://ipm.pitt.edu

Drs. Patrick Moore and Yuan Chang are recipients of the prestigious 2017 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.  The award from the Paul Ehrlich Foundation is bestowed annually in the Immunology, Cancer Research, Hematology, Microbiology, and Chemotherapy medical fields.  It is one of the most distinguished awards in medicine in Germany.  Dr. Moore is the Director of the Cancer Virology Program, an American Cancer Society Research Professor, and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Medical Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Chang is an American Cancer Society Research Professor and Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh.  Congratulations to Drs. Moore and Chang for winning this prestigious award!

"Understanding how genes co-evolve in animals could reveal links between human diseases"

Dr. Nathan Clark and his lab are looking at connections between what we think of as different diseases and how these connections can help lead to innovations in treatment of those diseases.  See the complete article in Pitt Med

Congratulations to Dr. Cecilia Lo and Dr. Michael Tsang on their recently funded NIH administrative supplement, "Assaying Heterotaxy Patient Genes in a Cilia Motility and Left-Right Patterning". This project will examine whether expression of the RCV can rescue the HTX phenotype elicited by MO gene knockdown in the zebrafish embryo. Also, it will establish genotype-phenotype correlation in ciliary motion defects and develop software for quantitative classification of ciliary motion defects using a computational approach with computer vision and machine learning algorithms for visual pattern recognition. Using this software, we will determine whether different RCVs are associated with different ciliary motion defects. This will provide insights into structure-function relationships in the regulation of cilia motility.

Congratulations to Dr. Carlton Bates and Co-Investigator Dr. Dennis Kostka on their recently funded National Institutes of Health proposal, "Critical Roles for Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptors in Bladder Development". The broad long-term objective of this project is to elucidate the molecular control of bladder development to develop effective therapies for structural bladder disease.