Category Archives: News

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”

Helen tan was awarded summer research funding as part of Cornell’s engineering learning initiatives (ELI) program. The ELI program enhances undergraduate learning by providing opportunities for students to engage in cooperative learning and undergraduate research. As part of this program, Helen will be working with David this summer on a project to better understand RNA folding inContinue reading “Helen to receive an engineering learning initiatives (ELI) grant for summer research”

Julius has been named to the editorial advisory board of a new journal published by the American Chemical Society dedicated to research in synthetic biology and systems bioscience. The journal, headed by editor-in-chief Chris A. Voigt of MIT, is the first journal dedicated to the growing field of synthetic biology, and is already making great strides in publishing cuttingContinue reading “Julius named to editorial advisory board of ACS Synthetic Biology Journal”

Kyle and Sarai have been awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowship. The NSF graduate fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in science and engineering, and is one of the most highly sought after awards at this stage of Kyle and Sarai’s careers. NSF fellows have gone on to become recognized leaders in their field,Continue reading “Kyle and Sarai win NSF Graduate Fellowships!”

Another fine piece of work done while Julius was a Miller Fellow in the Arkin Lab RNA SynBio group. In this paper, we show how to use computational methods to uncover key determinants of RNA-RNA interaction specificity in a trans-acting RNA mechanism that regulates translation (the RNA-IN/OUT system from transposon IS10). We developed these modelsContinue reading “Julius has a new paper in Nature Chemical Biology on rationally designing orthogonal RNA translational regulators”