|
Noa Etzyon was awarded the Mary Gates research scholarship. Noa is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Washington studying Public Health-Global Health. As an undergraduate researcher, Noa is currently studying the effects of CELF2 protein in RNA regulatory mechanisms that control innate antiviral immunity and the role of alternative splicing in innate programming immunity. Congrats Noa!
 Rachel received the Dr. Richard Titus Endowed Fund for Graduate Student Support in Immunology award, made possible by an endowment from Dr. Richard Titus to support graduate education in immunology in our department. Congrats Rachel! 🎉 
Very proud of Alexandra (Alex) Dinu, who received the Mary Gates research scholarship. She is a fourth-year undergraduate in our lab. Alex has been exploring novel regulatory controls of cytokines in the IL-10 family. Congrats Alex! 🎉  We had a fun and productive year in the lab despite the continued struggles in our personal and professional lives due to the pandemic. We supported each other in the lab, welcomed new members, and bid farewell to others. We were excited for Nandan Gokhale who received the Helen Hay Whitney Award. Yo Okamura joined our group who received a fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. These are prestigious post-doctoral fellowships and we are excited to see their continued successes. Rachel Van Gelder passed her General exam progressing to the next stage of her doctoral program! Frank Soveg and Johannes Schwerk, with help from others in the lab and the Seattle immunology community, discovered a critical immune gene variant that restricts SARS-CoV-2. This OAS1 variant also predicts patients progressing to severe COVID-19 disease. We are glad that we were able to contribute to the understanding of why certain people progress to severe COVID-19 disease. Frank Soveg received his doctorate on this work and he is currently pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship in the Gladstone Institute. Johannes Schwerk, Matthew Hendricks, and Snehal Ozarkar moved on to chase their dreams in industry. We thank them for making the lab a fun place and for their hard work over the years. Ram lab is approaching ten years this December and I am thankful for the current and past members for being so amazing! We thank all the members of the immunology community in Seattle for supporting each other during the pandemic. Happy Holidays!
Please welcome Dr. Yo Okamura who joined our lab a week ago! Yo received his Ph.D. from the University of Miyazaki, Japan, His main research interests are comparative mucosal immunology and innate responses. Yo is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Dr. Nandan Gokhale receives the best poster award at the 32nd Annual Immunology Department Retreat. He has received this award two years in a row!
An article in the Atlantic titled "A Better Way to Think About Your Risk for COVID-19" by Roxanne Khamsi highlights studies including ours published in eLife on how innate immune genes play a critical role in early immune responses to control SARS-CoV-2. Our study uncovers a single nucleotide polymorphism that generates distinct OAS1 isoforms. We show that the prenylated isoform OAS1p46 can neutralize SARS-CoV2 virus replication. Patients carrying OAS1p46 have less propensity of developing severe COVID-19 disease. Frank Soveg, Graduate Student in the Ram lab, successfully defended his dissertation on Wednesday, February 3, 2021. His thesis work was on “Prenylation in cell-intrinsic innate immunity to positive-strand RNA viruses” Congratulations Dr. Frank Soveg! Congratulations to Dr. Nandan Gokhale on receiving a three-year Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship award. Way to go Nandan!
The Helen Hay Whitney Foundation provides support for early postdoctoral research training in all basic biomedical sciences with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of imaginative, well-trained and dedicated medical scientists. A very prestigious award; on average, only 5% of applications receive funding. New 2020 TL1 Program Cohort Joins ITHS
|
