Mid-year update

There’s been a bunch of happenings over the past several months, listed here in no particular order.

1. Salvador Pena successfully obtained independent funding by way of an F31 NRSA to support the PhD portion of his MD-PhD degree and he defended his thesis proposal in May. Way to go!! Now the real work starts…

2. Our NSF grant (BIOS/IOS) was funded. As part of that grant, we are working with Dr. Tori Matthews, a former postdoc from the lab and current faculty at Monroe Community College, on developing an outreach program aimed at inner city youths. Plan on seeing more about this on our website in the near future.

3. Dr. Andrew Wojtovich published quite a nice review with Dr. Thomas Foster on the use of optogenetic reagents to study ROS signaling and also contributed to a recent publication with Dr. Jerod Denton from Vanderbilt on pharmacologic tools to study potassium channels.