Shaun

Akshay Kakumanu successfully defends his Ph.D. thesis

Akshay today successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Computational modeling of sequence features driving transcription factor binding in neuronal programming”. He’s the first student to defend from our lab! Akshay has been highly successful during his graduate studies, with a co-first author paper in Cell Stem Cell, contributions to two other published articles, a first …

Akshay Kakumanu successfully defends his Ph.D. thesis Read More »

Tim Kunz wins honors thesis award

Tim Kunz, an undergraduate researcher in our lab since 2014, has won the Fred Wedler award for Outstanding Undergraduate Dissertation in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Tim recently graduated with a B.Sc. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. His honors thesis is entitled “Visualizing and understanding chromatin organization using self-organizing maps”, and describes a new machine-learning approach to …

Tim Kunz wins honors thesis award Read More »

Bioinformatics infrastructure work with Pugh lab featured in Penn State news articles

A pair of Penn State News articles have recently featured our collaboration with Dr. Frank Pugh’s lab to build an automated pipeline for processing ChIP-exo data. As described in a recent Huck Institutes News article, we have been working with the Pugh lab to build a system for processing and analyzing ChIP-exo sequencing datasets. This …

Bioinformatics infrastructure work with Pugh lab featured in Penn State news articles Read More »

Study characterizing motor neuron programming dynamics published in Cell Stem Cell

Our manuscript describing the dynamics of induced motor neuron programming has been published in Cell Stem Cell. The manuscript, “A multi-step transcriptional and chromatin state cascade underlies motor neuron programming from embryonic stem cells“, results from a close collaboration between our lab, Esteban Mazzoni’s lab at NYU, and Uwe Ohler’s lab at the Max Delbrück …

Study characterizing motor neuron programming dynamics published in Cell Stem Cell Read More »

Divyanshi Srivastava joins the lab

Divyanshi Srivastava, a graduate student in the MCIBS Bioinformatics & Genomics program, has joined our lab. Divyanshi has a BE in Computer Science, with an integrated MS in Biological Sciences from the Birla Institute of Technology, India. Her Master’s thesis was titled: ” Chromatin Mediated Antigenic Variation in Plasmodium falciparum“, and was carried out at the …

Divyanshi Srivastava joins the lab Read More »

Collaborative paper on the pioneer transcription factor, Foxa2, published in Molecular Cell

Our collaborative study with Ken Zaret and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania has been published. The manuscript, entitled “The pioneer transcription factor FoxA maintains an accessible nucleosome configuration at enhancers for tissue-specific gene activation“, appears in Molecular Cell. While nucleosomes are often thought to block transcription factor binding at tissue-specific enhancers, lead author Maki Iwafuchi-Doi in …

Collaborative paper on the pioneer transcription factor, Foxa2, published in Molecular Cell Read More »

Collaborative paper on stomach to beta cell reprogramming published in Cell Stem Cell

A manuscript on which Shaun and group member Guanjue Xiang collaborated with Qiao (Joe) Zhou and colleagues at Harvard University has been published. “Reprogrammed Stomach Tissue as a Renewable Source of Functional β Cells for Blood Glucose Regulation” appears in Cell Stem Cell. In this study, the Zhou lab demonstrate that antral stomach cells can …

Collaborative paper on stomach to beta cell reprogramming published in Cell Stem Cell Read More »

Group publication accepted to PSB 2016

Shefali Verma in our lab (co-advised with Marylyn Ritchie) has had a manuscript accepted for presentation and publication at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The manuscript is titled “Phenome-wide interaction study (PheWIS) in AIDS clinical trials group data (ACTG)“. In this article, Shefali proposes a pipeline to identify interactions among genetic variants that are associated …

Group publication accepted to PSB 2016 Read More »