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Asher Preska Steinberg ’13 receives NSF Graduate Fellowship

May 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

steinbergAsher Preska Steinberg ’13, who majored in both chemistry and physics at Brandeis, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in materials research.  The fellowships, which are awarded based on a national competition, provide three full years of support for Ph.D. research and are highly valued by students and institutions.

At Brandeis, Asher worked on his senior thesis in chemistry with Professor Milos Dolnik as part of the Epstein Group. They studied the growth dynamics of Turing patterns in photosensitive reaction-diffusion systems. As part of the 2011 NYU MRSEC Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program Asher worked with Paul Chaikin to study active colloids, and they recently published an article in Science entitled “Living Crystals of Light-Activated Colloidal Surfers”. The article received attention from the press, including the LA Times, Wired, and Ars Technica.  Last summer Asher participated in the Columbia EFRC Research Program for Undergraduates (RPU) and studied silver plasmonic nanoparticles with Louis Brus.

Asher will be attending California Institute of Technology this coming fall in the field of Chemical Physics.

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Turrigiano elected to NAS

April 30, 2013 By

Professor of Biology Gina Turrigiano has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences this month. Turrigiano, a neuroscientist, is interested in synaptic scaling and remodeling, and in the tension between plasticity and stability in neurons during learning and development.

For more information, see the story at Brandeis NOW or the Turrigiano lab website.

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Dogic Lab Wins Andor Insight Award

April 23, 2013 By

The ‘Insight Awards‘  is a video contest showcasing research imagery from the physical and life sciences which utilize Andor technology to capture data.  This year, the Dogic Lab submitted a research video to the competition and garnered first prize in the Physical Sciences division for their video of Oscillating Microtubule Bundles.

From the competition notes:

Microtubules are a bio-polymer composed of the protein tubulin and are used extensively in the cell for cellular division, cell motility, and transportation of cargo within the cell. Here, we investigate the material properties of mixtures of microtubules, a depletion agent, and the molecular motor Kinesin. The microtubules, driven by Kinesin motors, spontaneously organize into bundles of microtubules that oscillate in a manner reminiscent of flagella and cilia found in biology. This engineered system will allow us to studying systems of self-propelled and self-organized matter that exist far from equilibrium in the field known as Active Matter.

We use standard fluorescent microscopy to image labeled microtubules in a thin, flow cell microscope chamber. An Andor Clara camera was used in conjunction with a Nikon Ti Eclipse microscope to capture this video.

Video and Entry by Stephen DeCamp.

For this, and more videos from the Dogic Lab, visit their YouTube page or their website at Brandeis University.

Filed Under: awards, grad students, labs, Physics, Quantitative BIology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Thomas to receive 14th Annual Strage Award

March 14, 2013 By

On March 26, 2012, Professor Gregory A. Petsko wrote on behalf of the Strage Award Selection Committee:

It is with great pleasure that I announce the recipient of this year’s Strage Award for Aspiring Young Science Faculty, Dr. Christine Thomas of the Chemistry Department.

Christine is one of the most promising young chemists in the country. In 2010, Prof. Thomas was selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program and in 2011, she was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. Christine is also the recipient of a 2012 National Science Foundation CAREER award and was selected as a 2012 Organometallics Fellow. Christine’s dedication to teaching was recognized with the 2012 Michael L. Walzer ‘56 Award for Excellence in Teaching at Brandeis.

Her research focuses on utilizing creative new strategies for the design of catalysts that have the potential to promote the multi-electron, multi-proton conversion of abundant small molecules (CO2, CH4, H2, N2, etc) into  useful fuels. The long-term goal of her program is nothing less than the development of solutions to the nation’s energy generation and storage problems. The catalysts she is currently designing all involve the cooperation  between different components of bifunctional catalysts. Specifically, her group is examining the cooperation  between (1) two metal centers in bimetallic frameworks, (2) metal centers and a non-innocent ligands, and (3) metal centers and their secondary coordination spheres, and the unique effects that such cooperation can have on the reactivity of these species.

Please join me in congratulating Christine on winning this award, and bring your students and postdocs t0 her Strage Award Lecture. The award ceremony and lecture will take place on Wednesday, April 3, in Gerstenzang 123 at 1:00 pm.

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Rosenstiel Award 2012- Dr. Steven J. Elledge

March 13, 2013 By

The 2012 Rosenstiel award is being awarded to Dr. Steven J. Elledge of Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for his seminal contributions towards understanding the eukaryotic DNA damage response[1] [2] .
Cells are constantly challenged by damage to their DNA. It of no surprise therefore, that both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells have evolved sophisticated and remarkably complex responses to deal with damaged DNA. It is for elucidating these mechanisms that Dr. Elledge is being honored with the Rosenstiel award this year.
Dr. Elledge’s interest with the DNA damage response began as a graduate student at MIT in the laboratory of Graham Walker, where he identified and cloned genes involved in DNA repair mechanism known as the SOS reponse in the bacterium E.coli[3, 4] . It was during this time that Dr. Elledge also invented an extremely useful molecular biology tool known as ‘phasmids’ which allowed for the ability to rapidly clone E.coli genes by packaging them in phages[5].
After MIT, Dr Elledge began his postdoctoral work at Stanford University where he discovered the Ribonucleotide reductase(RNR) genes in budding yeast[6, 7]. These genes are induced following DNA damage to promote the synthesis of deoxyribonucleotides which helps facilitate DNA repair. Dr. Elledge followed up on this work as a professor at Baylor University by a series of important papers that shed light on how cells arrest division after DNA damage. Most notably in 1994, his group identified the Rad53 checkpoint kinase that is activated after DNA damage and contributes to cell cycle arrest [8]. In 1998, his group also identified the mammalian homolog of Rad53 (Chk2) [9, 10].In 1999, the Elledge group reported that the DNA damage checkpoint in yeast occurs in two parallel pathways laying the foundation of our understanding of the DNA damage checkpoint[11]. More recently, work from the Elledge lab identified novel factors in the DNA damage response by performing a siRNA screen in mammalian cells[12].
Dr Steve Elledge has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1993. In 2003 he moved to Harvard Medical School as Professor in the Departments of Genetics and as a Geneticist in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Elledge was elected in 2003 to both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to the Rosenstiel award, he has received the DAMD Breast Cancer Innovator Award (2003), the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (2002), the John B. Carter, Jr. Technology Innovation Award (2002), and the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2001[2]).

Editor’s Note: On Mar 20, 2013, Elledge was named to receive a 2013 Canada Gairdner International Award.

1. Brownlee, C., Biography of Stephen J. Elledge. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2004. 101(10): p. 3336-7.
2. Haber, J.E., The 2005 Genetics Society of America Medal. Steven J. Elledge. Genetics, 2005. 169(2): p. 506-7.
3. Elledge, S.J. and G.C. Walker, Proteins required for ultraviolet light and chemical mutagenesis. Identification of the products of the umuC locus of Escherichia coli. J Mol Biol, 1983. 164(2): p. 175-92.
4. Elledge, S.J. and G.C. Walker, The muc genes of pKM101 are induced by DNA damage. J Bacteriol, 1983. 155(3): p. 1306-15.
5. Elledge, S.J. and G.C. Walker, Phasmid vectors for identification of genes by complementation of Escherichia coli mutants. J Bacteriol, 1985. 162(2): p. 777-83.
6. Elledge, S.J. and R.W. Davis, Identification of the DNA damage-responsive element of RNR2 and evidence that four distinct cellular factors bind it. Mol Cell Biol, 1989. 9(12): p. 5373-86.
7. Elledge, S.J. and R.W. Davis, DNA damage induction of ribonucleotide reductase. Mol Cell Biol, 1989. 9(11): p. 4932-40.
8. Allen, J.B., et al., The SAD1/RAD53 protein kinase controls multiple checkpoints and DNA damage-induced transcription in yeast. Genes Dev, 1994. 8(20): p. 2401-15.
9. Hirao, A., et al., DNA damage-induced activation of p53 by the checkpoint kinase Chk2. Science, 2000. 287(5459): p. 1824-7.
10. Matsuoka, S., M. Huang, and S.J. Elledge, Linkage of ATM to cell cycle regulation by the Chk2 protein kinase. Science, 1998. 282(5395): p. 1893-7.
11. Sanchez, Y., et al., Control of the DNA damage checkpoint by chk1 and rad53 protein kinases through distinct mechanisms. Science, 1999. 286(5442): p. 1166-71.
12. Adamson, B., et al., A genome-wide homologous recombination screen identifies the RNA-binding protein RBMX as a component of the DNA-damage response. Nat Cell Biol, 2012. 14(3): p. 318-28.

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Papaemmanouil gets NSF CAREER grant

February 20, 2013 By

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Olga Papaemmanouil has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future.

The research project funded by Olga’s CAREER grant (“Towards Extensible Performance Management for Cloud Data Services“) aims to a) develop declarative mechanisms that allow application developers to express custom performance criteria for data processing tasks and b) exploit the properties of these mechanisms to design extensible resource, workload and Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) management services for cloud databases.

The project also includes the design and development of XCloud, an extensible cloud-based platform that will unify these services into a usable cloud utility. The XCloud platform is expected to have a significant research and educational impact as it will act as a test-bed for new performance models and diverse performance management techniques for cloud databases facilitating research and innovation in the emerging domain.

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 junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Olga received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 2008. She joined the Computer Science Department at Brandeis in January 2009.

Other Brandeis science faculty receiving CAREER grants since 2010 include Christine Thomas (Chemistry), Aparna Baskaran, Matthew Headrick, and Zvonimir Dogic (all Physics).

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Herzfeld elected Mass Acad Sci Fellow

February 6, 2013 By

Judith HerzfeldJudith Herzfeld, Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at Brandeis University, has been elected as a 2013 Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences. Herzfeld will join Brandeis professors Carolyn Cohen, Irving Epstein, Jeffrey Hall, and Eve Marder as Fellows of this academy. Herzfeld’s lab at Brandeis has solid-state NMR and the development of force fields for molecular simulations as its most recent foci of research. Professor Herzfeld also has a longstanding involvement in developing new methods for teaching chemistry.

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2013 Sprout Grant Deadlines Announced

February 1, 2013 By

Call for Applications
3rd Annual Brandeis University Virtual Incubator
“Sprout Grants”

The Brandeis University Virtual Incubator invites members of the Brandeis Community (undergrads, grad students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, staff) to submit an application for a “Sprout Grant”.  These grants are intended to help entrepreneurs launch their research and ideas from the lab to the market. This spring, $50,000 will be shared among the most promising proposals.

Information sessions
  • Feb 6, 2 p.m.
  • Feb 8, 10 a.m.
  • Feb 11, 2 p.m.
Deadlines for this competition:
  • Preliminary Proposal: February 15, 2013
  • Full Application: March 8, 2013
  • Judging Event: April 15, 2013

Information sessions will be held in the Shapiro Science Center 1st floor conference room (Rm 1-09) at the following dates and times:

For more information email nborman at brandeis dot edu

The Brandeis University Virtual Incubator supports entrepreneurship through educating, mentoring, networking, and sponsoring. It is sponsored by the Brandeis University Office of Technology Licensing, and funded by the Office of the Provost.

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