Highlights from our second year
At the end of the month, our lab will turn two years old! We’re in peak toddler phase!
Continuing with last year’s tradition of an annual update, here are some highlights from our second year.
In January, we hired two awesome research technicians, Ruby Jacobs and Fiorella Lozada-Perdomo. Ruby and Fio quickly became invaluable members of the lab - making sure everything runs smoothly, taking care of our 800 fly stocks, keeping track of our fly food, and running lots of experiments! Not to mention planning a sweet holiday party.
Over the summer, two PhD students joined. Marco Peña Garcia and Trinity Pruitt, both from the Neuroscience PhD program, officially joined the lab and began laying the groundwork for their thesis projects. Marco is studying fly foraging decisions and Trinity is studying state-dependent modulation of taste processing.
We had 5 awesome undergraduate students. Crystal Wang, Maia Yang, and Lam Nguyen returned to the lab and are now officially the lab veterans, having been here for over 1.5 years already! They each presented their work at the spring research symposium. Seniors Crystal and Maia started working on their honors thesis projects that they will defend in the spring. Juniors Anna Perry and Sydney Walker just started research in the lab this fall and will be returning next semester.
We published a paper and posted a new preprint!
In January, our paper on bitter taste processing was published in eLife! This was a major group effort with the original experiments performed at Columbia and revision experiments contributed by several lab members, including rotation student Arvin Sarkissian and undergrads Maia, Lam, and Kaushiki.
In October, we posted a new preprint on sugar taste processing! This was also a group effort with experiments conducted by Ruby, Crystal, Lam, and Fio. We are currently doing revisions and hope to resubmit the paper within the next couple months (fingers crossed)!
We received our first NIH funding! Our R01 on sensory processing in taste projection neurons was funded by the NIDCD, and we’re excited to officially get this project going. We also started our second year of funding from the Whitehall Foundation and are grateful for their continued support.
But just so you get the full picture: we also had plenty of setbacks. We had broken equipment, failed experiments, confusing data that made no sense, at least one abandoned project, a couple of lost fly stocks, and of course grant and paper rejections. But we learned and moved on.
We’re looking forward to doing more cool stuff in 2024! And we’re still recruiting more people! Learn more about joining the lab here.
Again, we want to thank everyone who has helped us over the last year! That includes all our amazing colleagues at Emory and Georgia Tech who have been so welcoming and helpful. Special thanks to Robert Liu, Anita Corbett, Sam Sober, Astrid Prinz, Dieter Jaeger, Gordon Berman, Leila Rieder, and Malu Murugan. We also want to thank the Biology department staff members who make sure that things run smoothly!
