We are delighted to receive news that both Marlon Cummings, laboratory administrator to Prof. Alan Aspuru-Guzik, and Shao-Liang Zheng, director of the X-ray facility, will receive the 2016 Dean’s Distinction Award! Marlon was nominated by Prof. Aspuru-Guzik and Shao was nominated by Profs. Ted Betley and Dan Nocera. It is very unusual for a single department to receive two awards in the same year and this speaks to the high quality work and dedication to excellence of these two CCB staff members. We are very proud of their achievements and are thrilled that their efforts have been recognized by Dean Smith. Warmest thanks and congratulations to Marlon and Shao!
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Two Dean's Distinction Awards!
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40 Years of Service: Cheryl Ryder
Congratulations to Cheryl Ryder for her 40 years of service to Harvard, the majority of which has been in Chemistry!
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Ras 5k Race Results Yield Personal Bests and the Trophy
On a beautiful weekend day for running, 44 CCB researchers, staff, and professors from 11 different labs participated in the Ras na hEireann 5k. Coming in the quickest was Holly Rees from the Liu group, with an overall position of 23 and a very impressive time of 16:45! Next was Christopher Chidley of the O'Shea group with a time of 17:57. By far the most significant turnout came from the Schreiber group, which entered 11 runners and won three (negative) bonus points for entering the largest team. CCB team awards went to the #1 O'Shea, #2 Schreiber, and #3 Liu groups for combined scores of the five fastest runners on each team. Huge congratulations to all the runners! The O’Shea group will be the deserving guardians of the lab running trophy for the next 12 months!
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Fall Teaching Certificates of Distinction and Excellence Announced
Congratulations to our graduate students, preceptors and lecturers who will receive Certificates of Distinction in Teaching or Certificates of Excellence in Teaching for the following fall term courses! They will be honored at a presentation in April at the Bok Center.
Certificates of Distinction in Teaching
Chem 101 - Christopher Gerry
Chem 115 - Ziyang Zhang
Chem 160 - Jhonathan Romero Fontalvo, Benjamin Sanchez Lengeling
Chem 17 - Anthony Almazan, Matthew Patton, Holly Rees, Edward Schiffman, Daniel Strassfeld, Rachel Tandias
Chem 171 - Samuel Levi
Chem 30 - Bruce Hua, Tai Ng, Matthew Patton
Chem 60 - Luke Davis
EPS 135 - Joshua Klobas
LifeSci 1A - David Westwood
LPS A - Mykyta Artomov, Raecca Moore, Robert Powers, Alia Roberts
PS 2 - Ian Kivlichian
PS 10 - Matthew Patton, Anqi Zhang
Certificate of Teaching Excellence (for Lecturers and Preceptors)
Chem 100R - Austin Scharf
Chem 30 - Jacob Sanders
LPS A - Lindsay Hinkle
PS 10 - Lu Wang
Sci Phys Univ 20 - Logan McCarty
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Shair Group Begins Research Collaboration with Merck
Exciting results in the Shair lab promise both insights into the genetic control of acute myeloid leukemia and a potential treatment. The Shair group’s preclinical work, which had been supported by the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, will now become a collaboration with Merck.
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New Associate Director Deana Ste. Marie
A warm welcome to our new Associate Director of Administration, Deana Ste. Marie, who started here in CCB this week! Deana comes to us from the FAS office of the Dean of Science.
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New NSF Graduate Fellowships go to Betley, Schreiber, Shakhnovich Researchers
Congratulations to the following graduate students who have just been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation: first-year students Liz Johnson and Claire Lidston in the Betley group, and Victor Zhao in the Shakhnovich group, and second-year students Christopher Gerry and Bruce Hua in the Schreiber group!
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Leah DeFrancesco and Julie Zabbo join CCB as Lab Administrators
A big welcome to Leah DeFrancesco and Julie Zabbo, who joined CCB in March as Lab Administrators to the Friend and Zhuang groups, respectively! Leah comes to us from the CCB-affiliated Energy Frontier Research Center headquartered at the Rowland Institute and has also served as a lab administrator in Tufts University medical complex downtown. And with a master’s in biochemistry, Julie has conducted research and managed laboratories at several Boston-based institutions including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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NDSEG Fellowship goes to Vincent Chu
Congratulations to Vincent Chu of the Shair group, who has received a National Defense Science and Engineering fellowship!
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Star Finish for Holly Rees in Boston Marathon
In her very first Boston Marathon and only second marathon overall, graduate student Holly Rees from the Liu group has finished in 2:58:26, placing 34th in her division, 39th among all women runners, and 867th overall, in a field of over 30,000 runners! Aleks Markovic, lab administrator for the Liu group, writes, "It is a great achievement and we are enormously proud of her." Congratulations, Holly!
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New Technique to Correct Point Mutations in Human Cells Developed by Liu Group
Researchers in the Liu group have developed a new genome-editing capability, called "base editing" that can alter individual DNA letters without making a double-stranded break in the genome. As a result, base editing minimizes the random insertion and deletion of bases in the gene of interest that are a common outcome of current genome editing tools including CRISPR-Cas9. Base editors allow researchers to make a C to T, or a G to A, change in a target base specified by the researcher. The Liu group researchers used base editing to correct Alzheimer’s disease-related mutations in mouse neurons with much higher efficiency and without a large number of random insertions and deletions compared with conventional CRISPR-Cas9 methods. The work is reported in Nature.
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It's the National Chemistry Olympiad Again for Jacob Sanders
Twenty finalists attending the Chemistry Olympiad Study Camp during the first two weeks of June have the privilege of our newly minted Ph.D. Jacob Sanders' mentorship. As alumni may remember, Jacob helped lead the competing team to two gold medals and two silvers a couple of years ago, their highest finish in many years. This year the lucky finalists will have two peer mentors from Harvard. Jacob will be joined by Chemistry and Physics concentrator Sidharth Chand '17, the only other peer mentor.
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Welcome Gabriela Oppen to CCB!
Gabriela Oppen joins CCB as Administrative Coordinator to the Betley lab this week. Gabriela hails from Colombia, and has worked at Harvard for the past eight years, most recently in GSAS and the Committee on Scholarships. Welcome to CCB, Gabriela!
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CCB Graduates Celebrate Commencement
Congratulations to our CCB graduates!
Ph.D.
Bryce Anderson
Smaranda Bodea
Zsofia Botyanszki
Gregory Boursalian
Carolyn Brotherton
Jeong-Mo Choi
Xiaochuan Dai
Reem Hannun
Garrett Drayna
Anna Glavan
Wooyoung Hong
Andrew Hoover
Lucas Kocia
Bon Jun Koo
Christopher Lemon
Margie Li
Jiao Ma
Max Mankin
Hitomi Nakamura
Katherine Phillips
Noam Prywes
Emily Ricq
Jacob Sanders
Ankita Shastri
Anna Shneidman
Amy Sutton
Amanda Turek
Andrew Ullman
Stéphanie Valleau
Hu Zhang
Ziyang Zhang
A.M.
Aykut Aydin
Jennifer Bergner
Casey Brodsky
Samantha Cassell
Zamyla Chan
Christina Chang
Carina Chittim
Christopher Gerry
Bruce Hua
Soohyun Lim
Thomas Markovich
Rocco Policarpo
Katherine Silvestre
Daniel Strassfeld
Jeremy Warner
Chenglong Xia
Yunfei Xu
Tao Zhou
A.B.
Anthony Almazan
Stefano Belfiore
Thomas Carroll
Alyssa Chan
Charlotte D’Acierno
Niamh Durfee
Louise Eisenach
Carew Giberson-Chen
Nat Goldberg
Dipti Jasrasaria
Jim Kim
Max Meehan
Artur Meller
Kaleb Mikami
Tiffany Minors
Michael Musharbash
Mary-Grace Reeves
Ruth Saganty
Nina Shevzov-Zebrun
Rachel Tandias
Ahmed Zaeem
Vanya Zvonar
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Chicago's Benton Medal Goes to Jim Anderson
The University of Chicago bestows its infrequently-awarded Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service this year to Professor Jim Anderson. He is cited for work that "spans precise laboratory measurements, airborne field campaigns, and policy initiatives on the national and international stage." He receives the award at the university's 527th convocation in mid-June. Congratulations, Professor Anderson!
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Two New Assistant Professors Join CCB
We are very pleased to welcome Assistant Professors Brian Liau and Christina Woo to CCB as of July 1st! Professor Liau is no stranger to CCB, having received his Ph.D. in 2013 and undergraduate degree in Chemistry & Physics in 2007. Most recently, he has been working on cancer epigenetics at Massachusetts General Hospital. Professor Woo, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale University, joins us from Stanford University, where she has held a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellowship in the area of chemical glycoproteomics. She is also a recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund CASI (Career Awards at the Scientific Interface) fellowship as of last year.
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CCB Director Elizabeth Lennox named Co-Director of Graduate Studies in CCB
CCB Department Chair Charlie Lieber and Dan Nocera, Director of Graduate Studies, announce that Lab Director Elizabeth Lennox has been appointed as the CCB Co-Director of Graduate Studies. She will partner with Dan Nocera to work with CCB's students across the platform of questions and issues that can arise during one's graduate education experience. As noted when she joined CCB, her extensive background in leadership positions both centrally and within other graduate departments at Harvard allows her to offer unique mentorship and guidance to students during their time in CCB. Both Elizabeth and Dan are excited to jointly support CCB's graduate students, and we congratulate Elizabeth on her additional appointment!
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SitN director Amy Gilson is a SMASH16 Fellow
CCB graduate student Amy Gilson is one of the inaugural class of Fellows chosen for the 2016 Science Media Awards & Summit in the Hub conference, hosted by radio station WGBH. The conference takes place September 20-22. A gathering of over 300 leading scientists, journalists, and science media communicators from all over the world, SMASH16 explores new methods of innovation in interactive science media. Amy is co-creator of the Science in the News Sit’N Listen podcast series, and was chosen from a pool of over 300 applicants from more than 60 countries.
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Dr. Richard H. Holm Wins Welch Award
The Welch Foundation has named Dr. Richard H. Holm a recipient of the 2016 Welch Award, to be presented in October. He will share the prize with Dr. Stephen J. Lippard, MIT.
Professor Holm is credited with changing the manner in which inorganic chemistry is applied. According to Chair Charles Lieber, "the intellectual rigor he has brought to the field has transformed the way inorganic chemists approach problems, and has raisied the standards and enlarged the accomplishments of the entire field of chemistry. His notable achievements in research include developing a rational approach to synthesis of biomimetic low molecular weight complexes that duplicate biological Fe-S centers and creating the chemical and intellectual framework for understanding their function."
The Welch Foundation, based in Houston, is one of America’s largest private funding sources for basic chemical research. The purpose of the Welch Award is to foster and encourage basic chemical research and to recognize, in a substantial manner, the value of chemical research contributions for the benefit of mankind, as set forth in the will of Robert Alonzo Welch.
For a complete story, click here.
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New HHMI-Gates Faculty Scholar Emily Balskus
Professor Emily Balskus has just been named a 2016 HHMI-Gates Faculty Scholar by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute! The HHMI Faculty Scholar program is a new 5-year initiative by the HHMI, in collaboration with the Simons Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to support early-career scientists at least four years into their current faculty positions and who are considered to have great potential to make unique contribution to their fields of endeavor. “We are delighted to help enable superb early-career scientists to bring transformative innovation to priority global health problems,” said Chris Karp, Director of Global Health Discovery and Translational Sciences at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Congratulations, Emily!
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