• Chase has left the lab and is off for a new adventure in St. Louis.

• Ziyi Zhao is our newest post doc! She is bringing joy while working on the cell wall side with powerful tools.

• Nebat Ali is a BMS rotation student joining us for the fall quarter.

Summer has flown by! Lots of changes and things to clink glasses to around here…

• The lab had our first annual retreat in Sonoma

• New research tech Sebastian Flores started and is chromato-gramming up a storm

• Kristine was awarded the iMicro fellowship for 2019-2020

• Our newly minted PhD Candidate Fauna was selected as a HHMI Gilliam Fellow

• Calla Martyn has joined the lab to apply her bioinformatics wizardry to study tick-microbe interactions

• Seemay was named a Pew Biomedical Scholar and dyed her hair (unrelated)

• And today we bid farewell to our beloved Summer Research Training Program student Eleanor Wang, aka resident lysis assay expert and Kombucha taster-in-chief.

Our lab is continuing to grow, and our latest addition is Chase Mateusiak! Chase is joining us as an intern for the summer. He will be helping us successfully tell our computers what to do. Chase plans to pursue a graduate degree in bioinformatics.

Kristine (aka K-Trotta, @kristine_trotta) is rocking it this year! Not only did she pass her quals but she was also awarded the Microbial Pathogenesis and Host Defense (MPHD) Fellowship and named a UCSF Discovery Fellow. This is all on top of being a great mentor to other students in the classroom and in the lab. Here she is today (hoping her PI will stop taking pictures) right before giving a fantastic talk at the MPHD Seminar Series about the role of bacterial cell wall heterogeneity in intermicrobial interactions. We are excited to see what K-Trotta does next!

We have two rotation students joining us for the fall quarter: Sarah Heater (Tetrad) and Daniel Barrero (Biophysics)!

The lab recently celebrated our first R01! We are eager to learn more weird things about ticks and move the field forward.

First, we are happy to announce that Fauna Yarza will be joining our group as our first BMS graduate student! Ady and Manuela wrapped up their rotations in the lab with a lot of new, exciting data and passed their batons onto two new rotation students in the lab, Gabi and Jenna. We also submitted our first lab pre-print found here, which reports a field study of internal microbes found in ticks. Finally, Seemay was recently selected as Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator and a Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Scholar!

More firsts! We're excited to add our new post-doc Atanas to the mix. He not only brings bacterial cell wall and organic chemistry expertise, he helps balance out the ratio of cat to dog people in the lab.

We're happy to welcome Fauna, our first biomedical sciences rotation student to the lab. She's a Northern California local who loves her poodle. Her research interests include bacterial genetics and host-microbe interactions (some of our favorite kinds of interactions in Chou lab).

Rachel, our new technician, comes to us from Seattle, Washington. She's a bacterial wizard and is interested in pursuing medicine one day. We're glad to have her on the team!

Shivani, our SRTP summer student, gave her final research presentation this week. We thought her talk was awesome, and it turns out we weren't alone! She went home with the prize for the best talk in her session. Congrats to Shivani!! 

Had a great time with the Bondy-Denomy lab at the Giants game versus the Cleveland Indians! It was obvious the Giants won 5-4 because we came through. We love hot dogs and rooting for the underdog. 

Our first graduate student! Kristine is part of the TETRAD program and hails from New England.  

Shivani is an Amgen scholar visiting us from RIT through the Summer Research Training Program (SRTP). She is our resident peptidoglycan wrangler and will be working on characterizing enzymes involved in bacterial antagonism. We're excited to have her here!