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Meet the 2024 class of Pew Biomedical scholars, including Dr. Clare Smith, Ph.D.

Congrats to Rachel Meade who was just announced as a winner of the Genetics Society of America DeLill Nasser Award for Professional Development in Genetics for Fall 2023!

This award is given twice a year to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. DeLill Nasser Awards support attendance at meetings and laboratory courses. Rachel will be using funds from the award to present her work at the upcoming 2024 TAGC meeting in DC

Are you a current graduate student wrapping up your thesis? Want to come and learn diverse mammalian models that can be applied to questions of pathogenesis? The Smith Lab have a fully funded postdoctoral position available to work on host-pathogen interactions. We leverage genetically diverse mice and macrophages in conjunction with new bacterial genetic technologies to understand host and pathogen factors that impact tuberculosis disease.

If you are a mammalian geneticist wanting experience in infection biology OR a bacterial/pathogenesis researcher looking to learn new mouse models please check out our publications and apply here. Please include in your cover letter what specific research projects or questions you are hoping to work on in our lab.

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.

The Smith Lab have a new fully funded postdoctoral position available to work on host-pathogen interactions underlying tuberculosis. We leverage genetically diverse mice and macrophages in conjunction with new bacterial genetic technologies to understand host and pathogen factors that impact tuberculosis disease.

If you are a mammalian geneticist wanting experience in infection biology OR a bacterial/pathogenesis researcher looking to learn new mouse models please check out our publications and apply here.

The Smith Lab hosted Alwyn Ecker (MGM) and Marco Gontijo (MGM) for the Fall rotation. Alwyn worked with Dr. Kaley Wilburn to explore host genetics in a TB susceptible Collaborative Cross genotype and knockout strain. Marco worked with Dr. Oyinda Adefisayo to investigate bacterial polyketide synthase variability amongst Mycobacterial strains. During the rotation, they also worked with Rachel Meade to learn QTL mapping in R and undertook the Regional Biosafety Laboratory (RBL) high containment biosafety bootcamp for work at BSL3. In addition to their individual projects, Marco and Alwyn also jumped into help ongoing lab projects with macrophages and aerosol infections – outstanding work!

Congrats To Kaley, Rachel and Emma for their work on a recent preprint describing the differential role of IRGM proteins during Tuberculosis. Check out the bioRxiv here. This was a fun and highly collaborative effort with Dr. Andrew Olive (Michigan State), Dr. Jörn Coers (Duke) and Dr. Chris Sassetti (UMASS). Great joint effort to put this together and hopefully is the first of many collaborative projects!