Alanis presented a poster on her LSSURP research at the UMN Summer Undergraduate Research Expo. Thank you for a productive and exciting summer!
Trudy is officially a Ph.D. candidate! Congratulations on passing your written and oral preliminary exams, Trudy!
Valerie successfully culminated her Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) award experience with a poster presentation at the Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium. Her poster was titled, "Establishing homologous recombination status in in vitro models of high-grade serous ovarian cancer using fluorescence microscopy". Great work, Valerie!
Congratulations, Dr. Perez! Jesenia successfully defended her thesis, "Identifying proteomic determinants of differential PARPi response in high-grade serous ovarian cancer". Jesenia was the first graduate student to join the Thomas lab, and she had an integral role in the growth of the lab. She will remain at the University of Minnesota for a postdoctoral fellowship with Drs. Justin Drake and Justin Hwang.
Congratulations, Dr. Duda! Jolene successfully defended her thesis, "Elucidation of the high-grade serous ovarian cancer acetylome to identify novel therapeutic vulnerabilities," and she is the first graduate student from the Thomas Lab to earn her PhD. We'll miss you, Jolene and we appreciate the many contributions you've made to the lab since 2021. We wish you all the best with your new job at Thermo Fisher Scientific in San Jose, CA!
Stefani is excited to join 18 other mass spectrometrists who were selected as the American Society for Mass Spectrometry's 2024 Emerging Investigators! These investigators are researching a wide array of topics ranging from experimental and computational mass spectrometry science, to applications in structural biology, inorganic chemistry, spatial biology, microbiology and proteomics.
Congratulations to Valerie on winning yet another travel award! Valerie received a University of Minnesota CBS Undergraduate Student Research Travel Award of up to $1500 for the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS) 2024 in Pittsburgh, PA. Valerie will present a poster at ABRCMS.
Stefani gave an oral presentation ("Adopting fundamental principles from the clinical laboratory to accelerate the clinical translation of targeted mass spectrometry-based proteomic assays") at the 25th International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC) in Melbourne, Australia where she also chaired the Clinical Omics session.
Jamie presented a poster on her LSSURP research at the UMN Summer Undergraduate Research Expo. We will miss you Jamie!
Jolene was selected as one of the 2024-2025 UMN Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF) awardees! The DDF gives the University's most accomplished PhD candidates an opportunity to devote full-time effort to an outstanding research project by providing time to finalize and write their dissertation during the fellowship year. The award includes a $25,000 stipend, tuition for thesis credits, and a $1,000 conference grant. Congratulations, Jolene!
Danke, US HUPO for selecting Jolene to receive a Travel Award to support her attendance at the upcoming 23rd HUPO World Congress in Dresden, Germany!
Jolene was selected to receive a Pletcher Graduate Fellowship award! The intent of the fellowship is to "support a graduate student, with preference given to women, pursuing Ph.D. research in the College of Biological Sciences". We sincerely appreciate the generosity of Drs. Carol H. and Wayne A. Pletcher! Great job, Jolene!
Jolene's abstract, "Characterizing HDAC6 as a Drug Target in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer Treatment" was selected for an oral presentation at the US HUPO 2024 conference in Portland, OR! She was also selected to receive a Travel Award! Thank you, US HUPO, for supporting Early Career Researchers!
Jolene is the UMN's newest Technology Commercialization (Tech Comm) intern! UMN Tech Comm facilitates the transfer of UMN innovation beyond the research lab by helping researchers to license research, patent innovative ideas, establish startups, and facilitate commercialization.
Congrats to Valerie on the acceptance of her abstract for a poster presentation at the upcoming ABRCMS conference in Phoenix, AZ Nov. 15-18. Valerie was also a recipient of an ABRCMS student Travel Award!
Jesenia is the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center's 2023 recipient of the Molecular, Genetic and Cellular Targets of Cancer T32 Predoctoral Fellowship. Congrats Jesenia!
Nate shared his LSSURP research via poster presentation at the UMN Summer Undergraduate Research Expo. Thanks for all your hard work this summer!
We are excited about funding from an American Cancer Society - Internal Research Grant to support a new project in the lab, "Functional proteomic insights into the mechanisms of HDAC6 inhibitor treatment sensitivity in high-grade serous ovarian cancer”!
The Thomas lab welcomes Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program (LSSURP) student Nate Kreuzer! Nate is a rising sophomore majoring in Biochemistry and Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
Thanks to Agilent Technologies/LCGC for interviewing Stefani for a podcast about Clinical Mass Spectrometry!
Thank you to the V Foundation for selecting our project to be featured in their "Under the Microscope" series! This series is a great way to help communicate science in an accessible way. In the words of Jim Valvano, "Don't give up ... Don't ever give up!"
The Thomas lab is excited to begin a new collaboration with Kathleen Boris-Lawrie's group from the UMN's College of Veterinary Medicine, Dept. of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences to investigate the impact of dysregulated translation on the proteomic determinants of PARP inhibitor sensitivity in high-grade serous ovarian cancer. Our new collaboration is made possible by a grant from the Molecular Pathology and Genomics Division of the Dept. of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at UMN. We look forward to venturing into the world of translatomics!
Jolene made quite a statement while attending her first international scientific conference [21st Annual Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) World Congress; Cancun, Mexico] by winning 1st Place in the 3-Minute Thesis Competition! Congratulations, Jolene and your fellow award finalists from China, Canada, South Africa, Germany, and Australia! Thank you, HUPO, for supporting Early Career Researchers.
Summer 2022 undergraduate LSSURP intern Shannon Culbert will present her research at the SCCUR Annual Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA on November 19th. Congrats on the acceptance of your abstract and your travel grants, Shannon!)
Jolene's second 1st-author manuscript within the last two months has been published! We thank Dr. José Luque-Garcia from the Complutense University of Madrid for extending an invitation to our group to contribute a chapter to the "SILAC" Methods in Molecular Biology book series. (Check out Chapter 18...and the other great chapters!)
Congratulations to Jolene on the publication of her first 1st-author manuscript! Read about HDAC inhibitor-induced changes in the global proteome landscape of high-grade serous ovarian cancer cells in the journal Proteomics!
Stefani accepted an invitation to join the Editorial Board of the journal Clinical Proteomics, which encompasses all aspects of translational proteomics. The journal places special emphasis on the application of proteomic technology to all aspects of clinical research and molecular medicine.
The Thomas lab participated in MOCA's HOM Teal Strides for Ovarian Cancer 2K walk!
Valerie and Shannon shared their research via poster presentation at the UMN Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium.
Jesenia is the lab's newest Ph.D. candidate! Congratulations, Jesenia! Excellent job on your oral qualifying exam.
The Thomas lab welcomes two undergraduate student summer interns: Valerie Barrera Estrada and Shannon Culbert! Valerie is a Biochemistry major and a rising sophomore at the University of Minnesota, and Shannon is a rising senior at the University of Notre Dame who is majoring in Science Preprofessional Studies with a minor in Science, Technology, and Values. Shannon is participating in the University of Minnesota's Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program (LSSURP).
The Thomas Lab received The Jane Levin and Judy Reisman Research Award in the amount of $100,000 from the Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance (MOCA) for a project titled, "Autophagy-mediated sensitization of high-grade serous ovarian cancer cells to PARP inhibitor treatment in the setting of BRCA1/2 mutation status". Tremendous thanks to Jane, Judy, and MOCA!
Jolene has officially advanced to Ph.D. candidacy! Congratulations on a job well done on your written and oral preliminary exams, Jolene!
Congratulations to Jesenia for being accepted to the competitive EMBL-EBI Proteomics Bioinformatics workshop, which will be held in Hinxton/South Cambridgeshire, England this July! Jesenia was also selected to receive a partial scholarship to attend the workshop.
Stefani was interviewed about Testing for Mucopolysaccharidosis Disease Management for the "Ask the Expert" section of the Jan/Feb 2022 issue of Clinical Laboratory News (American Association for Clinical Chemistry publication).
Congratulations to 2nd-year Ph.D. student Jesenia Perez on the publication of her first 1st-author manuscript! Read about the differential protein expression induced by low-dose PARP inhibitor treatment in BRCA1-mutated ovarian cancer cells in the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
Dr. Stefani Thomas gave a presentation on "Mass spectrometry-based proteomic analysis of high-grade serous ovarian cancer: toward clinical utility" for the 2021 Mass Spectrometry and Advances in the Clinical Lab (MSACL) 7th European Congress.
Graduate student Jolene Duda was awarded a Mayo Clinic Ovarian Spore Developmental Research Program Pilot Study grant to study HDAC inhibitor sensitization of BRCA-1/2 wild-type high-grade serous ovarian cancer cells to PARP inhibitor treatment.