Welcome new postdocs

Several postdocs have joined the group in the last few months, though I’ve been remiss to make an announcement.Dr Sofia Robb, who completed her PhD at the University of Utah, joined the lab in August 2011 and has been working on the NSF funded Rice transposable element project in collaboration with Susan Wessler’s lab. She has already developed a new tool for identification of TEs from high throughput sequencing which we are employing on several varieties of rice and expanding it to be a more general purpose tool. Sofia is also co-developing teaching modules for the Dynamic Genomes course.Dr Brad Cavinder, who completed his PhD at Michigan State University, joined the lab in January 2012 and is working on transposable elements in mosquitoes as part of the WM Keck funded project to identify and utilize active TEs as molecular tools in mosquitoes.A third new member of the lab, Peng Liu who completed her PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will start in February to work on molecular characterization of some pathogenesis factors in the amphibian pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.