News
YEAR 12
July 2021: Alice is promoted to full professor. She learns this when she turns her phone on after getting off a plane!
June 2021: Fei's paper demonstrating that TMEM106B genotypes associate with the degree of TDP-43 pathology in ALS brain and that TMEM106B knockdown increases TDP-43 aggregate formation in cells is published in Acta Neuropathologica. You can read the paper here. What is amazing is that Fei did this work as a one-year Visiting Scholar, with 9 months of that year during COVID19 lockdown.
May 2021: Adama joins the lab. Welcome, Adama! Yunji wins the Neysa Cristol Adams Award for her research at her graduation. Congrats to Yunji!
YEAR 11
April 2021: Roseanne passes her prelim. Congratulations, Roseanne!
March 2021: A three-lab collaboration (with the labs of Kelvin Luk and Dejian Ren, whom Alice refers to as Master of the Lysosome) culminates in a Nature paper describing the cell biological, animal model, and human genetics dissection of TMEM175, a risk factor for PD. You can read the paper here and the Penn coverage here. Alice is hopeful that TMEM175 can be a new target for therapeutic development, which seems to be happening already.
February 2021: Our first paper describing the MIND Initiative is published. You can read about our efforts to enroll and molecularly characterize our entire PD clinical population here. Spoiler alert: PD patients enthusiastically want to enroll and almost all of them want to know their own genetic status. Congrats to Tom, who led the paper, and Noah, whose reassuring presence is definitely a big factor in why MIND's enrollment rate is >95%!October 2020: David and Tom's paper predicting which Lewy Body Disorder patients will have Alzheimer's Disease pathology at autopsy is published -- introducing the ADNC Risk Score, which you can read about here. Alzforum covered it here.
September 2020: Roseanne joins the lab. Welcome!
July 2020: Our lab puts three undergrads through "R Bootcamp" as part of the American Physician Scientists Association Virtual Summer Research Program (APSA VSRP). Welcome to Evan, Maurice, and Chibby!
YEAR 10
May 2020: Maria passes her Bioengineering dissertation proposal! Good job, Maria!
Also, Junchao and Alice help Alice's brother Royce Chen understand the impact of COVID19 on NYC resident physicians. You can read the paper here.
May 10, 2020: Our 10 year Lab-iversary.
We sadly realize that we cannot have a lab retreat in the middle of COVID and have a Zoom dinner instead. You can watch the nostalgic video here. Congratulations to the winner of Guess Whose Baby -- Defne Amado! (First runner-up Travis Unger also did a good job.)
April 2020: Maria is awarded her F31. Tom is awarded his K23. Congratulations to both of you, and THANK YOU for providing some much-needed good news in the middle of a global pandemic!!
David and Tom find that with genotypes at just 3 SNPs + age at symptom onset, you can guess reasonably well which PD and DLB patients will have concomitant Alzheimer's Disease pathology at autopsy. We think this has implications for therapeutic targeting of tau and amyloid-beta in PD patients during life. You can read the preprint here.
January 2020: Junchao and Fei join the lab. Welcome!
Alice and Maria ask whether "Omics" are hope or hype in an (opinionated) review for Trends in Genetics that you can read here.
November 2019: Noor and Rebecca join our team. Welcome!
October 2019: Multiple years, multiple cohorts in the making, we find that plasma GHR, BSP, OMD, and Aminoacylase-1 differentiate PD from controls, after screening 1000+ proteins in 500+ people. You can read Marijan and Maria's paper here.
June 2019: Amazingly, two lines of research in the lab have converged! We find that TMEM106B, a gene we have been studying for years in frontotemporal dementia, modifies the rate of cognitive decline in Parkinson's Disease. You can read Tom's paper here.
June 2019: Our fabulous undergraduates Yunji, Ben, and Daniel are upping the game in the lab. David begins his lab rotation. Welcome, all!
For the nostalgic, here are the earlier years.
