News & Fun

Updates!

• Congrats to Haruka on new baby Sora and on a new preprint, with assists from Isabella and Josh, describing how a single ubiquitin ligase destabilizes substrates that span all three ERAD 'branches'! We wish her the best as she soon heads back to Japan to start a new position at Juntendo University.
• We enjoyed hosting summer HHMI Cech Fellows Kaylee McConnell and Jiale Lin in our lab this summer!
• Much fun (and work) was present at our annual lab retreat and conferences, including Michael's presentation at CSHL Translational Control.
• Welcome to our new RA Karen Zhang, postdoc John Watters, and PiN student Jessica Co!
• The entire lab and some Boston-based alums also gathered to celebrate the lab's 10-year anniversary!

Recent lab highlights:

• Alice F passes her PQE!
• Five of us attended the FASEB Ubiquitin / Protein Folding Meeting in Louisville, KY. Great job by Dawa, who presented a talk and co-organized the pre-meeting Ignite Career Forum, poster presenters João and Isabella (her first poster at a scientific meeting - done!), and João and Alice F for consistent A/V support! It was great seeing familiar faces, some after more than 10 years, and hearing the outstanding science.
• Susan was promoted / tenured, built on the hard work of lab members, present and past! We are all excited to keep on keeping on.

It's 2026! In addition to birthday celebrations, holiday pottery painting with the Harper lab, our annual January white elephant gift exchange, and the first big snowstorm of the winter (that took our building out of commission for a few days) over the past months, special congratulations to:

• Ammaar for passing his PQE!
• Dawa and Jingjing on the publication of our work with the Churchman and Ott labs on yeast mitochondrial translational activators, and Jingjing et al. on the publication of our work on organellar SPFH proteins!
• Michael and his wife Katherine on baby Daniel, and Jingjing and Jianwei on baby Gaoxing!

Summer flew by! First, we welcomed students, Josh Corbo and Alice Fan, who joined the lab for their dissertation research. We also welcomed a postdoctoral fellow, Alice Herneisen, and another student, Ammaar Saeed, who are working on collaborative projects with the Brown lab. Second, congratulations to Jingjing, Matt, Xin Gu, Chris Nardone, et al. on the published versions of our collaborative work on proteasomal complexes containing midnolin and TXNL1 with the Elledge and Greenberg labs! Finally, we managed to retreat to the coast (at the same time as Hurricane Erin-induced riptides) to regroup, refocus, and marvel at nature.

Times are challenging, but things are still happening. First, three of us had a great time organizing and/or presenting at the RNA Meets Protein Decay EMBO workshop in beautiful Vienna!

Second, we had to say goodbye to the last OG, pre-pandemic, member of the lab, Mike, who snagged a senior scientist position at Generate:Biomedicines. The lab will never be the same, but we're also excited to welcome two new rotation students, Grace Dearden and Josh Corbo!

Congratulations to Beza for passing her PQE!

Also check out Jingjing's beautiful work on human organellar SPFH protein assemblies, the Erlin1/2 complex and the PHB1/2 complex, that are implicated in protein quality control at the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria, respectively!

Excited to share Mike et al's recent findings on how the partitioning of ARMC1 between the cytosol and distinct mitochondrial complexes controls cellular mitochondrial distributions!

Also, we're not great at March Madness brackets, but we can at least crown a winner - congratulations to Isabella!

Lots of changes in 2025: in addition to our traditional after-the-holidays white elephant gift exchange and regular birthday celebrations, we are sending off Sam to her new postdoctoral position in the Sankaran lab and Yinong to her new industry job (luckily both nearby!)...and celebrating the acceptances of Sam's and Mike's papers!

Also check out some recent preprints featuring our collaborative work on yeast mitochondrial translational activators (yay Dawa and Jingjing!) and on the midnolin-proteasome pathway (yay Jingjing and Matt!)!

Happy New Year! We kick off 2025 by welcoming new postdoctoral fellow, Jianwei Zeng, and rotation student, Prabhat Kattel.

Celebrating the holidays with a lot of parties (including the joint Harper and Shao lab bowling party) and dogs from Texas (and their new toys)!

Congratulations to Dr. Samantha Sedor, who successfully defended her PhD thesis!!!

In addition to the party (critically featuring iced coffee), the lab spent a lot of time in the kitchen recently prepping, wishing Nikita the best, and celebrating João's birthday.

Also check out our new preprint featuring Jingjing et al.'s work showing how the thioredoxin TXNL1 binds to actively translocating proteasomes, presumably to facilitate protein degradation!

Welcome to new rotation student, Alice Fan, who is joining after back-to-back birthday celebrations and departmental retreat!

Beza joins the lab for her dissertation research!

Welcome to new postdoctoral fellow, Yinong Liu!

Another lab retreat, this time in Killington, VT - with some special visitors, in the books!

We said goodbye to Beonka after a busy and productive summer. Also, congratulations to Sam on her preprint describing how the essential protein codanin-1 (CDAN1) sequesters and inhibits multiple copies of the histone chaperone ASF1! She also got her box checked to graduate - we celebrated after her final dissertation advisory committee meeting together with some of Jingjing's project completions!

We're excited to join the HHMI community this fall! One of many reasons - along with birthdays, our annual lab cleaning, and trips to beautiful green spaces with great company - for celebrations this summer. 

Welcome to Philip Spyrou, another summer student!

Welcome to new rotation student, Bezawit Sahile, and to SHURP student Beonka Sharpe!

Spring is a good time for kitchen hangouts, catching up with lab alumni, and lots of sushi - the latest to celebrate Muskaan's time in the lab and send her off with best wishes to graduate school at MSK in NYC! She will be missed, but she left us some amazing mini paintings and lab plants to remember her by.

Welcome to new rotation student, Nikita Kupko!

Welcome to our new research associate, Isabella Ruiz!

February 2024 was an epic month for lab birthdays on Valentine's Day (Mike), Presidents' Day (Sage), and Leap Day (Muskaan, who officially turned 6)!

Welcome to new rotation student, Alexios Staikos!

Check out João and Matt's paper in collaboration with the Taunton lab showing a cool molecular glue mechanism used by the eRF1 degrader SRI-41315!

Sage is also happy to report she made it back from a cabin in the woods, and we kicked off the year celebrating Dawa's and Michael's birthdays together with a post-holidays gift exchange!

We may be consistently down a few members due to illness these months, but that won't stop celebrations of random donuts, our pumpkin carving win, Yingshi's next steps, the holidays, and Dawa's postdoctoral fellowship!