November 2, 2024: Tori completes in the Nutshell Game organized by the Center for Communicating Sciences. Be there!
October 15, 2024: Zhaomin gives a seminar in the Department of Biochemistry at University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
October 11, 2024: Yang lab at the CeZAP-ASM Virginia Meeting.
October 3, 2024: I am hosting Prof. Mario Feldman from Washington University to give the SPARK/CeZAP seminar at Virginia Tech. The title of his seminar is: “Dissecting the virulence strategies of Acinetobacter baumannii“.
September 5, 2024: Megan and her paper in VT News! See “New research illuminates the impact of surface properties on bacteria movement“.
August 28, 2024: The finished product of Megan’s paper, Surface hydrophilicity promotes bacterial twitching motility, is finally out in mSphere. Congrats to Megan, Tori, Keane and David!
On a separate note, it took two months from acceptance to it being published. I am all for supporting American Society for Microbiology (ASM) as a paid member of my own society, but I wished they’d speed up the publication of accepted manuscript. The same process only took a week for the paper below! ASM, please take notice!
August 22, 2024: Collaborative paper with Dr. Anne Brown in Biochemistry is now available online at Archives Of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Congrats to Jay McDonald-Ramos for working hard on this to get their thesis work into press! I am impressed with Elsevier publishing in their efficiency. The manuscript was accepted on August 15 and it is now online in its final form within a week. Never before had I had a paper going through the production stages and getting finalized so fast.
July 25, 2024: Aariq presents a poster at the 2024 Summer Undergrad Research Conference at Virginia Tech. His crew of moral support and him strutting his stuff!
May 29-31, 2024: Aariq, Ghazal, Tori & Zhaomin attend the VADDRx Symposium at Virginia Beach. Ghazal’s poster with Joe Quinlan from the Santos lab was selected for a talk at the symposium!
May 20, 2024: Welcome our summer students Aariq Hug, Chloe Luzarraga, and Delaney Prescott to the lab! Megan will be here until the end of June as well. She will be heading to UCSD as a PhD student in the Fall!
May, 2024: Lab gathering and honoring the graduate at the end of the Spring semester! A circuit breaker tripped twice!
April 18, 2024: Megan receives the Buikema & Galway Undergraduate Research Award from the Department! Congrats, Megan, for a very deserving recognition! (Photo below, Megan with Dr. Popham, acting department head)
Feb. 3, 2024: Megan, Tori and Ghazal all presented posters on their research projects at the 21st Annual Research Day. Congrats to Tori for winning a poster presentation award!
Dec. 5, 2023: Exciting news: the Yang lab welcomes Ghazal Soleymani as a new PhD student from the MCB program!
Dec. 4, 2023: Yang lab collaboration with Dr. Bahareh Behkam in mechanical engineering lands NSF funding.
Nov. 3-4, 2023: Megan attended the ASM Virginia Branching meeting and received a travel award for the meeting. Congrats!
August 3, 2023: Two big milestones to celebrate.
- Jay Ramos successfully defended their MS thesis. Congrats to Jay for a huge career accomplishment!
- Keane‘s paper on the interactions of M. xanthus PilB with c-di-GMP is accepted for publication by Journal of Bacteriology! All in all, Keane has FIVE first-author publications from his work in the Yang lab. Congrats to Dr. Keane Dye, a job well done! Link: https://doi.org/10.1128/jb.00221-23
July 28, 2023: Megan presented a poster on her summer research at 2023 Summer research Symposium at Virginia Tech.
June & July, 2023: Zhaomin gave talks at Myxo 2023 in Princeton, NJ and the Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Adhesion and Signal Transduction in Newport RI this summer.
June 23, 2023: The Commonwealth Health Research Board (CHRB) awarded a 2-year research grant to Drs. Yang and Santos (Chemistry) for an antivirulence project starting on July 1, 2023.
May 11, 2023: There is a postdoc opening in the lab. Please see here for https://jobs.chronicle.com/job/37449536 for the application portal and more information.
May 9, 2023: This is the end of an era for the Yang lab as Dr. Keane Dye moves to his next adventure as a postdoc fellow at USU School of Medicine. Best of luck to Keane!
April 28, 2023: Megan presenting her poster at the Dennis Dean Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship Conference.
April 21, 2023: Congrats are in order!
- Megan receives the David Lyerly Summer Fellowship.
- Keane receives the best poster prize at the VTCDD poster session.
March 20, 2023: A few updates.
- Tori Shimozono joined the lab as a graduate student in Fall, 2022. Tori was an undergraduate researcher in the lab from Summer, 2021 to Spring, 2022. She worked in the lab in the summer of 2022.
- Megan O’Hara joined as an undergraduate student researcher in the summer of 2022.
- Rachel Machie & Stephanie Strickland joined the lab as undergraduate student researchers in Spring, 2023.
November 15, 2022: Our paper on PilB inhibitors as antivirulence compounds is published in Microbiology Spectrum. Keane’s 4th publication as a first author. Congrats!
Sept 21, 2022: CeZAP awards an interdisciplinary team building piolet grant to a group of Virginia Tech scientists lead by Prof. Yang. The co-PIs are Dr. Webster Santos (Chemistry), Dr. Mike Klemba (Chemistry), Dr. Coy Allen (Pathobiology) and Dr. Florian Schubot (Biological Sciences).
May 4, 2022: Congrats to Dr. Keane Dye for a successful dissertation defense today! Great job! Keane will stay on as a postdoc in the Yang lab.
April 29, 2022: Keane’s paper on M. xanthus biofilm is published in Frontiers in Microbiology! Congrats, Keane!
February 5, 2022: Keane gave an excellent talk as one of four invited graduate student speakers at Biological Sciences Research Day!
June 21, 2021: Yang and Brown collaboration receives Dean’s Discovery Fund.
June 8, 2021: Congrats to Keane for being awarded the Lewis Edward Goyette Fellowship for Summer, 2021 from Biological Sciences!
March 3, 2021: The lab’s first paper on drug discovery is published. See here: High-Throughput Screen for Inhibitors of the Type IV Pilus Assembly ATPase PilB
Aug. 24, 2020: Jay Ramos joins the Yang Lab as a graduate student. Welcome!
June 3, 2020: Congrats to Keane for being awarded the Liberati Scholarship for the 2020-2021 academic year from the Department of Biological Sciences.
May 7, 2020: Congratulations to Keane for being awarded a GSDA fellowship for Fall, 2020 from Graduate School through the College of Sciences!
Jan. 7, 2020: Dr. Yang was invited to join the editorial board of Frontiers in Microbiology as an Associate Editor.
Dec. 23, 2019: The paper ” Cyclic-di-GMP and ADP bind to separate domains of PilB as mutual allosteric effectors” by Keane Dye is accepted for publication in Biochemical Journal (Link). Congrats to Keane, Hohoho 🙂 !
Dec. 20, 2019: Manuscript by Sarah Riggs-Shute on the construction and use of a transposon in mycobacteria for the isolation of conditional mutants is accepted for publication in Frontiers in Microbiology (Link). Congrats to Sarah and Happy Holidays!
Dec. 4, 2019: Congrats to Keane Dye for passing his prelim exam!
Aug. 20, 2019: It is official! The Yang lab receives $1 M funding from NSF for a biofilm/motility project.
April 8, 2019: Andreas Sukmana receives the 2019 William Preston Master’s Thesis Award in STEM from Graduate School. Congratulations!