Author Archives: jblucks

Our collaborative paper with Rhiju Das’ lab at Stanford on the RNA mapping database (RMDB) is out in bioinformatics. Rhiju started the RMDB as a way to easily share RNA chemical and enzymatic probing data in a one-stop-shop resource with plenty of useful tools and such for getting access too and analyzing this data. With the addition ofContinue reading “The RNA Mapping Database Paper is out!”

Every week, The Cornell Daily Sun, features a different professor in their column ‘The Scientist’. This week, the Sun’s Sarah Cohen wrote about one of the Lucks Lab’s goals of creating biological components out of RNA to engineer cellular circuitry. They also had enough space to say a few words about heat and mass transfer.Continue reading “Julius featured in Cornell Daily Sun’s ‘The Scientist’”

Welcome to our newest undergraduate researcher, Sitara Sankar! Sitara is a sophmore BEE student who will work with Sarai on studying RNA-ligand interactions. Welcome Sitara!

Congratulations Kyle and Sarai on successfully passing the qualifying exam with stellar marks. The ‘Q exam’ consists of evaluation of class performance as well as a research proposal complete with a project description, preliminary data and future aims. Everyone was very impressed by the quality of the proposals. It was a great first year!

The Great Lakes National Scholarship recognizes outstanding students in STEM disciplines in undergraduate and graduate programs.  The award was initially open to 20,000 applicants, which were cut to around 2,000 in the first round.  Upon providing a faculty evaluation and further information, a final pool of 750 award winners were chosen nationwide. According to PaulContinue reading “Kyle Wins Great Lakes Scholarship!”

The fourth Benasque RNA Bioinformatics Meeting was this year in Benasque, Spain. Researchers from around the world gathered in a beautiful pyrenees town to talk all things RNA – from new folding algorithms, bioinformatic RNA searches, RNA visualization and more. Julius gave an introductory primer on experimental RNA structure probing with lots of details onContinue reading “Julius Speaks at Benasque RNA Bioinformatics Meeting”

Julius has been named a 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award recipient. The DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions in academia and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs. In particular, YFA provides high-impact funding to the elite junior faculty early in their careersContinue reading “Julius wins 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award!”

  Julius recently gave a talk on the SHAPE-Seq pipeline at the Upstate NY Illumina Users group meeting. It was a great opportunity to see all the exciting developments coming out of Illumina, and to share some of that SHAPE-Seq goodness.

Stanley Qi recently graduated from UC Berkeley! I remember meeting Stanley in my first few days in the Arkin Lab, when neither of us knew the first thing about synthetic biology. I think it was our realization that through hard work and creativity we could just teach each other the ways of that wonderful RNAContinue reading “Congratulations to Dr. Stanley Qi!”

Farren Isaacs, a pioneer of RNA synthetic biology now at Yale University (see two of his classic papers here and here) wrote an excellent news and views article about our recent Nature Chemical Biology paper on rationally designing orthogonal RNA translation regulators. Farren does an excellent job of placing our work in the context of the larger goal ofContinue reading “Recent orthogonal RNA article featured in Nature Chemical Biology News and Views”