News
December 1st, 2022: New preprint with Harrison Lab!
We contributed to work led by Melissa Harrison's lab (U. Wisconsin) on understanding how GAF foci are formed: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.29.518380v1
November 19th, 2022: Kaeli Mathias wins 2 poster awards!
Kaeli won both the best application and peoples choice awards at the CCGM retreat!
October 31st, 2022 -Happy Halloween!
Highlights this year included "Drosop-Leia" and "Polycomb-repressed graduate student"
October 21st, 2022 -Publication with Liling Wan Lab
A pleasure to contribute to this work spearheaded by our close collaborators in Liling Wan's lab. Read the paper here. co-authors from our lab are Alan Boka and Kaeli Mathias.
September 9th, 2022 -Sena Sarıkaya is rotating with us!
Sena Sarıkaya (DSRB) is doing her 1st rotation with us. She wants to push the limits of in vivo imaging!
July 25, 2022 -Santosh Adhikari joins the lab as a postdoc
Santosh Adhikari joins the lab as a postdoc, He just completed his PhD in physics from U. of Minnesota.
July 18, 2022 -Mattisen Dimmler joins the lab as a tech
Mattisen Dimler joined us a research technician, she will be supporting the labs mission and learning to do research.
July 6, 2022 -Ella Hayward-Lara joins the lab for her PhD
Gabriela Hayward-Lara joined the lab after rotating with us last fall. We are very excited to have her on board.
June 13, 2022 -Welcome Anna Crombie-Summer Intern
Anna Crombie, a student at the University of Leicester has joined us for an internship this summer
June 3, 2022 -Alan Boka selected as a SBMB T32 Fellow
Alan Boka was selected to be on the Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics training grant!
May 16, 2022 -Welcome Sapna Krishnakumar
.jpg)
Sapna Krishnakumar, a sophomore in Biological Sciences at IISER Mohali has joined us for an internship this summer
May 12, 2022 - CDB Lab Olympics Champions!
Our team "MS2 good to lose!" (named by S Fallacaro) won the lab Olympics at the CDB Retreat!
May 10, 2022 - Alan Boka passed his PhD candidacy exam
Congratulations Alan Boka on becoming our second PhD Candidate!
May 5, 2022-Kaeli Mathias passed her PhD candidacy exam
Congratulations Kaeli Mathias on becoming our first PhD Candidate!
March 28, 2022 - New Lab Member: Samantha "S" Fallacaro
S returned to our lab for their PhD after rotating with us last summer. They will be working on questions related to the mechanotransduction of gene regulation
January 25, 2022 - New Lab Member: Ernesto Gamauf
Ernesto is a sophomore majoring in Biology at UPenn and has a keen interest in embryonic development!
January 11, 2022 - Cornerstone Blog News Story
Our research was featured in the CHOP cornerstone blog: https://www.research.chop.edu/cornerstone-blog/new-innovator-award-advances-live-imaging-technology-to-see-embryonic-gene-regulation
November 23rd, 2021 - New microinjection system!
We received and installed our new Femtojet microinjection system and our new Lecia DMi8 inverted microscope. Lots of poking embryos coming up!
November 19th, 2021 - New grant from Margaret Q. Landenberger Foundation!
-
November 5th, 2021 - Microscope enclosure installed
.jpg)
As our light-sheet microscope is near ready for prime time we had an all hands on deck effort to install a enclosure to protect the optics and shield the instrument form air currents in the room!
November 4th, 2021 - Microscope main hardware construction done!
Al l the major components of our MOSAIC microscope are finally in place and now its time for fine-tuning!
November 1st, 2021 - New lab member: Sarah O' Konski
Sarah is a freshman majoring in Biochemistry at UPenn. She comes to our lab through the Penn Freshmen Exposure to Research in Biological Science (PennFERBS) and we are very happy to have her start her scientific career with us!
October 31st, 2021 - Happy Halloween!
We celebrated Halloween with a "meet and treat" with the whole CHOP CCGM! Fun and silly festivities ensued.
October 8th, 2021 - DP2 Celebration with Wan Lab!
We celebrated getting the NIH New Innovator award with our close collaborators and fellow awardee Liling Wan and her lab. Our co-mentored student Kaeli Mathias is guaranteed/mandated to have a super innovative thesis project!
October 5th, 2021 - NIH Directors New Innovator Award!
The lab was awarded a NIH Directors New Innovator Award (DP2). This $2.4 million award will fund our efforts to develop new approaches to quantify the molecular dynamics of gene expression and nuclear organization during early embryonic development.
NIH Press Release | Awardees | CHOP Press Release | Penn Press Release
October 4th, 2021 - Puttachai Ratchasanmuang AKA Net joins the lab as a Research Associate
We are very happy to have Net on board. Net brings with him tons of experience working with flies and lots of enthusiasm. He has previously worked as a Research Technician with Shawn Little at Penn and Thomas Gregor at Princeton.
September 20th, 2021 - Gabriella Hayward Lara joins for her 1st rotations
Gabriella Hayward Lara who is in the DSRB program and recently graduated from Princeton joins the lab for her first rotation. Welcome!
August 20th, 2021 - Lab Happy Hour
We celebrated the end of summer rotations and welcomed some new folks on a beautiful Philly day!
August12th, 2021 -First image processing workshop
We kicked off our image processing workshop series. We discuss how to write code to analyze imaging data quantitatively while minimizing manual intervention. This workshop is led by Alan Boka and Tomer Lapidot (Ophir Shalem's lab).
June 30th, 2021 - Kaeli gets selected for Genetics T32 training grant
Congratulations to Kaeli Mathias for being selected for the Genetics T32 grant. lots of exciting discoveries ahead!
June 28th, 2021 - Cody Eskandarian joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher
Cody Eskandarian is an undergraduate in biochemistry and biophysics at UPenn.
June 24th, 2021 - New Optical Table!
We received our second optical table (thanks Melike Lakadamyali's lab), nothing like the feeling of putting the first piece on a blank optical table. We will be using this one for prototyping new optical setups.
June 22nd, 2021 - Lab Happy Hour
We celebrated the end of Kaeli Mathias's and Adam Jabak's rotations and welcome Guzel and Patrick with libations and games at "The Commons"
June 4, 2021 - Guzel Naik joins as a Research Intern
Guzel Naik is joining us for 6 months as a research intern. He has a BSc in Biology and previous research experience in epigenetics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences
June 3rd, 2021 - Patrick Samaha joins as a Research Intern
Patrick Samaha joins us for the summer. He is currently an undergraduate student in Bioengineering at the University of Toronto.
June 2nd, 2021 - S Fallacaro joins as a Rotation Student
S Fallacaro joins the lab for their first rotation. They are a student in The Developmental, Stem Cell, and Regenerative Biology division within the Cell and Molecular Biology graduate group.
May 26th, 2021 - Its taller than Appy now!
I think he may need a ladder soon
May 26, 2021 - Kaeli Mathias joins the lab for her PhD, co-mentored with Liling Wan's lab in Cancer Biology
Kaeli Mathias decides to be co-mentored by Mustafa and Dr. Liling Wan. She has boundless enthusiasm, energy, and deep curiosity!
May 24, 2021 - Birthday celebration
The lab surprised Mustafa with a birthday cake. What a great group of people! :)
May 21st, 2021 - The microscope is rising
Its growing!
May 14th, 2021 - Alan Boka joins the lab for his PhD!
Super excited that Alan Boka has decided to join the lab for his PhD work. He is a fantastic young scientist with a fearless attitude. Looking forward to lots of creating and exciting science.
May 11th, 2021 - Ultrafast laser is installed
Good progress for one day! After receiving our room we have our optical table, two photon laser, and server rack setup!
May 10th, 2021 - We have our microscope room!
The renovation of our microscope room is complete. After 5 months of anticipation we can finally start on our microscope. Thanks to CHOP for facilitating this large rennovation
May 2021 - Mustafa featured in the CAMB Newsletter
Read the feature here: https://cambnewsletter.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/pioneering-pandemic-pis
April 19th, 2021 - New rotation students
Kaeli Mathias and Adam Jabak from the BMB graduate group joined the lab for their third rotations. The flies still outnumber us significantly.
April 10th 2021 - First lab party
Weather was warm, vaccines were in arms and our first rotation student Alan Boka's time was up. We had a cookout and some libations to celebrate!
March 16th 2021-First lasers are on
Its so pretty!
March 9th 2021-We received our Chameleon laser
Looking forward to lots of photons
March 2nd 2021-Nick Gattone produces our first data
We ran a gel and learned something. Science!
January 29th 2021-First group meeting
And we are off! first group meeting.
January 25th 2021-New lab members
Today we welcome our first postdoc Apratim Mukherjee who is a mechanical engineering PhD from Virginia Tech where he studied how cells sense their extracellular matrix using synthetic nanofiber networks. We also welcome Alan Boka a rotation student from BMB Graduate Group. The lab is growing!
January 20th 2021-Our flies have a home!
Today our environmental chambers to house our flies from Darwin Chambers were installed. Now they have a nice cozy place to grow!
Watch a video of the installation here: https://twitter.com/MustafaMir16/status/1352214822830669826?s=20
January 11th 2021-New lab member.
We are a "we" now. Our first lab member Nick Gattone has joined us as the labs first Technician! Nick has just finished his Masters working with Nir Yakoby at Rutgers where he worked on the role of tRNA fragments in regulating gene expression. Welcome Nick!
January 5th 2021- Lab is officially open.
The lab is officially open!