The Smith Lab had a busy and exciting 2023, highlights include:
– Summer Harris joined the lab as a research technician and mentor for our ABSL3 work in the Regional Biocontainment Lab
-Oyinda, Rachel and Clare attended and presented at the International Mammalian Genome Conference (IMGC) in Tsukuba City, Japan. Rachel took home the GSA trainee prize for outstanding presentation!
-Kaley led the collaborative paper from Smith/Olive/Coers/Sassetti labs on the differential requirements for IRGM proteins during tuberculosis infection in mice, published in Infection and Immunity
-Rachel wrapped up analysis and published a new genome-wide bacterial screen combined with the BXD mouse panel to identify new host-pathogen genetic interactions. Published in G3
-Oyinda led and wrote a new review on Mycobacterial genetic technologies for probing the host-pathogen microenvironment as part of the Special Series for Early-Career Investigators in Infection and Immunity
-Marco Gontijo and Alwyn Ecker officially joined the lab as graduate students in the MGM program and completed their training for BSL3/ABSL3 independence
-Kaley and Oyinda presented posters at the Cold Spring Harbor Pathogenesis meeting
-Marco and Alwyn presented posters and Rachel gave a flash talk at the MGM Department retreat at Wrightsville Beach, NC
-Clare was the trainee’s selected speaker at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology seminar, University of Buffalo, NY and the Department of Microbiology seminar, Michigan State University.
-Rachel presented her new work on host susceptibility loci underlying tuberculosis at the DMM meeting on “Infectious Disease though an Evolutionary Lens” in London, UK. She also received a Duke School of Medicine Biomedical PhD student Research Pilot Grant to visit Thomas Keane’s lab at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, UK to work on a new collaborative genomics project.
