News

June 2026

New NIH Grant awarded

The lab received an NIH/NIGMS R15 (~$583K) for Mechanisms of Mpro autocleavage, investigating how the SARS-CoV-2 main protease self-processes.

A second NIH Grant funds a campus collaboration

Our lab is a key collaborator on a new NIH/NIGMS R15 (~$596K) led by Dr. Xiaolong Luo (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering) to build a rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing platform using multiplex static gradients. Congrats Xiaolong!

SPARK Innovation Seed Grant funded. 

A new CUA Innovation Seed Grant (~$57K) will launch SPARK, a summer practicum helping CUA faculty and staff build and implement AI tools and workflows.

ProtFunAgent accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 

Work with Sajib Dip and Dr. Liqing Zhang (Virginia Tech) on structured ontology reasoning for protein function annotation was accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Sydney, Australia).

Congratulations, doctoral graduates! 

Dr. Mariliz Colon from the lab Mariliz defended and completed her PhD on the bactericidal effects of antidepressants in April, and is first author on a manuscript in preparation on how SSRIs permeabilize bacterial membranes.

Congratulations, Dr. Ayobami Awe! Ayobami, a doctoral committee student, successfully defended his PhD in 2026.

Congratulations, graduates! 

Congrats to Sebastian Cuervo on earning his BS in Biology and induction into Phi Beta Kappa and awarded Best Undergraduate in Biology

Welcome, new researchers! 

The lab welcomes undergraduate researchers Brady Savard, Simon Gibbons, and Grant Sodomka.

April 2026

Congratulations, Dr. Mariliz Colon-Asconia! 

Mariliz defended and completed her PhD on the bactericidal effects of antidepressants, and is first author on a manuscript in preparation on how SSRIs permeabilize bacterial membranes.

2025

Nature Communications paper on desmosome mechanics. Dong, Elgerbi, et al. showed that actomyosin forces trigger a conformational change in desmoplakin within desmosomes (Nature Communications, 2025) — congratulations to co-author Ahmed Elgerbi.

Antara Syam at the Biophysical Society meeting. Antara presented work on the off-target lipid-membrane interactions of cationic amphiphilic drugs, probed with gramicidin A biosensors (Biophysical Journal, 2025).

PhD defenses (doctoral committee). Congratulations to Dr. Jarin Mourosi and Dr. Saniya Davis, both of whom defended their dissertations in 2025 with Dr. Choy serving on their committees.

May 2025

New CUA Innovation Seed Grant. A ~$52K Innovation Seed Grant will support work predicting antidepressant toxicity in gut microbiota using deep and reinforcement learning.

December 2024

NAIRR Pilot allocation awarded. 

The lab received a National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot computational allocation, with Dr. Liqing Zhang (Virginia Tech), to predict gene function using large foundation models and genomic context.

May 2024

New paper in Genes. 

Del Puerto et al., including Ahmed Elgerbi and Dr. Choy, examined the role of transcription factor SOX3 in tumorigenesis (Genes, 2024).

Desmoplakin mechanosensor preprint posted. "Desmoplakin is a desmosomal mechanosensor" (Dong, Elgerbi, Choy, Sivasankar) was posted on bioRxiv (Nov 2024).

Congratulations, Dr. Ramyajit Mitra! Ramyajit, a doctoral committee student, defended his dissertation in 2024.