Yale MCDB

Yale’s Colton Center for Autoimmunity Announces 2025 Awardees Advancing Innovation in Autoimmune Disease Research | Yale Ventures The Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale University is proud to announce the recipients of its 2025 awards, recognizing outstanding, translationally focused research projects that aim to accelerate…

Congratulations to @craigmcrews.bsky.social on his award from Yale's Colton Center for Autoimmunity

Two For One: Researchers Find One Neuron Can Send Multiple Messages In fruit fly brains, one neuron can trigger two different types of behavior in response to an attractive odor.

New work ‪@currentbiology.bsky.social from the labs of James Jeanne ‪@yaleneuro.bsky.social‬ and Thierry Emonet @mcdb-yale.bsky.social‬ show that some fruit fly neurons 🧠 can be multifunctional: the same neuron can tell fruit flies to walk towards the smell of rotting fruit and speed up.

Congratulations to Ken Nelson and Paul Forscher on their retirements! Their collective impact on MCDB cannot be emphasized enough.

Welcome Freya Wencker, MCDB’s newest lecturer!

Freya has been hired as an Lecturer and will begin teaching in Fall 2025 and will oversee the FACS core facility.

She will teach Laboratory in Nucleic Acids I and II as well as co-teach the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory.

Congratulations to Ronit Kaufman on her promotion to Sr. Lecturer!

Ronit joined the MCDB faculty in 2018 and has been an integral part of the success of MCDB 1050 - Biology, the World, and US.

SEND US YOUR DESIGNS!

The MCDB Logo Contest ends on July 18, 2025 at 11:59 PM.

Send your designs to mcdb.communications@yale.edu

See full guidelines and submission instructions at mcdb.yale.edu

Congratulations to @davidbreslowlab.bsky.social on his recent promotion to Associate Professor on Term!

David joined the MCDB faculty in 2017 and has since made incredible discoveries in the study of the primary cilia in cell homeostasis and human disease.

Congrats to Elizabeth on winning the Spangler Prize for her PhD thesis! 🥳

In preprints: a new preprint curation initiative from Development

In preprints: rethinking the foundations of the ovarian reserve

Andrea Rix and Binyam Mogessie @binyammogessie.bsky.social @mcdb-yale.bsky.social discuss a recent #preprint from Wamaitha et al.

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Join us in congratulating Tom Pollard on receiving the 2025 Connecticut Medal of Science!

Tom and his wife Patty stopped by campus while in town for the award ceremony.

📸 : Joe Wolenski

Jiyeon Leem (Mogessie Lab) has been awarded a Fellowship from the Lalor Foundation for pursuing her research project ‘Uncovering the origins of egg aneuploidy associated with female reproductive aging’. Congratulations, Jiyeon!

From the office of the President:

Help defend Yale's teaching, research, and scholarship

president.yale.edu/posts/2025-0...

Celebrating the Class of 2025 May 19, 2025The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences celebrated its Class of 2025 graduates today with a Diploma Ceremony at Woolsey Hall, followed by a reception in Commons.

Congratulations to our MCDB Graduates!

Elizabeth Mae Gordon
Will Krause
Ted Leung
Garrett Sager
Alicia Stein
Han Wan
Yiting Xu

gsas.yale.edu/celebrating-...

Congratulations to all our MCDB graduates!

At Yale, Angelin Mathew found the place where medicine meets faith At Yale, Angelin Mathew found a way to bridge her interests in the body and spirit, an intellectual journey she’ll continue as a Rhodes scholar studying theology and medical anthropology.

MCDB graduate Angelin Mathew spoke with YaleNews about her time at Yale and her next steps as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

news.yale.edu/2025/05/13/y...

Congratulations to MCDB Ph.D. students Lam Vo and Emily Siff on their selection as 2025 Annie Le Fellows!

This fellowship, created in memory of Annie Le, is awarded to doctoral candidates in the BBS who excel in research and improving the world around them.

Members of the Jacob Lab Wenxin Yuan and Yi-chun Huang are the first and second author on a new study that reveals a new mechanism with relevance to a pediatric brain cancer.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40229276/

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40229276/

Congratulations to the 2024-25 Spangler Award Recipients!

Ted Leung, Gendron Lab
Elizabeth Gordon, Hatzios Lab
Garret Sager, Clark Lab

Nine PhD Students named 2024-25 Prize Teaching Fellows April 24, 2025Nine PhD students from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) have been named Prize Teaching Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year: Nicholas Berrettini (Film & Media…

MCDB's France Moore has been named a Prize Teaching Fellow for the 2024-25 academic school year. She is one of nine Ph.D. students selected. Congratulations, Frances!

gsas.yale.edu/about/news-a...

Yesterday i had a refreshing science break! My @mcdb-yale.bsky.social colleague Stavroula Hatsios spoke about her work on host pathogen interactions. So impressed with her work and creativity! 🤩🧪🦠

Headshot of Lisa Baik, PhD

This #TraineeTuesday, meet Lisa Baik, PhD (@mosquitolady.bsky.social), a postdoc in the @carlsonlabyale.bsky.social @mcdb-yale.bsky.social! Lisa's research has recently been published in Nature, uncovering groundbreaking findings on how mosquitoes taste their environment, including human skin. [1/5]

Had two wonderful days at Yale University @yale.edu presenting our latest findings on the "Origins of neurons and nervous systems." Thank you @jacobmusser.bsky.social & lab for the invitation and discussions. #choanoflagellates #sponges #ctenophores

Online now! An affinity-based depletion strategy for evaluating the effects of ergothioneine on bacterial physiology by Anna B. Seminara and Stavroula K. Hatzios @hatzioslab.bsky.social‬ at @yale.edu @mcdb-yale.bsky.social http://dlvr.it/TJRWKG

Pawel Burkhardt, Ph.D. (University of Bergen) is our next speaker in the MCDB Seminar Series.

"Tracking the deep evolutionary origins of neurons and nervous systems"

Wednesday, March 12, 2025
BASS 305 | 3:30 PM

The MCDB Seminar Series is sponsored by the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Fund

MIT Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Yukiko Yamashita comes to Yale to deliver her talk titled, "Germline immortality and speciation"

Wednesday, March 5, 2025
BASS 305 | 3:30pm

The MCDB Seminar Series is sponsored by the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Fund

Surface remodeling and inversion of cell-matrix interactions underlie community recognition and dispersal in Vibrio cholerae biofilms - Nature Communications It is commonly assumed that bacterial cells within biofilms are glued together by matrix components, but the details are poorly understood. Here, Moreau et al. show how dynamic changes in attractive a...

Published research: Led by MCDB postdoctoral associate Alexis Moreau, this study sheds "light on the dynamics of diverse cell-matrix interactions as drivers of biofilm development"

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Whom would you like to hear at our next event?

The planning for the 5th Virtual ChemBioTalks is starting. We are excited for talks by @oconnorlab.bsky.social, @craigmcrews.bsky.social and Kelly Chibale.

Let us know in reply to this post, whom you would additionally like to hear!

#Perspective by Mackenzie Krone and @craigmcrews.bsky.social at @mcdb-yale.bsky.social discusses the need for TPD growth, through enhanced spatiotemporal precision, increased synthesis throughput, and optimized cooperativity. http://dlvr.it/TJ5Nc9

The MCDB Seminar Series welcomes Rebecca Bart on February 26!

3:30 PM | Bass 305
Event will be broadcast, link to come

Yale scientists recode the genome for programmable synthetic proteins A team of synthetic biologists have re-written the genetic code of an organism using a novel cellular platform for producing new classes of synthetic proteins.

In a new article published in @nature.com, the Isaacs lab, in collaboration with the lab of Jesse Rinehart at the Systems Biology Institute, has developed a new genomically recoded organism (“Ochre”) with one stop codon.

news.yale.edu/2025/02/06/y...