After six amazing years and two years of leave, the Shah Lab is officially winding down operations. A huge thank you to all the students, trainees, colleagues, and collaborators for an incredibly gratifying experience. I will miss you all.

Theresa Rogers joins our lab as a postdoc. Although, technically a postdoc, Theresa brings with her a vast experience in RNA biology and metagenomics. Before joining Rutgers, Theresa was a tenured professor at California Lutheran University.

Welcome aboard!

We are really sad to see Shun leave our lab. She was the first person to join our group and set up an entire wet-lab on her own. She will be joining Devanshi Jain's lab at Rutgers University as a lab technician.

We will miss you!

Alex Cope joins our lab as a postdoc with a ton of experience with omics-data and evolutionary theory. He will be studying translation dynamics in extremophiles. Welcome aboard!

We are excited that to announce the arrival of the lab baby #3 - Elona Kasza. Congratulations Tongji, Tomas, and Eleanor!

Alex Salibi successfully graduated with a Masters degree. He will be going back home to Russia to pursue a Ph.D. Good luck Alex! We hope to see you again soon.

Three amazing undergrads from our lab - Sadhana Chidambaran, Yasasvi Talagadadeevi, and Kevin Shen graduated with a degree in Genetics. Huge congratulations!!

Premal presented a talk on the Quantifying changes in transcription and translation over 22 years of bacterial adaptation at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC 2020) via Zoom on April 22, 2020.

Sadhana Chidambaran has successfully defended her honors thesis titled "Investigating bias in fragmented RNA-seq data". Congratulations!!

Sadhana Chidambaran has accepted the offer from Johns Hopkins University's graduate program in Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics. We are so proud of you!

Alexandra Logerfo joins our lab as graduate student with a ton of experience in cancer biology. She will be studying the role of sequence features on translation of transcript isoforms. Welcome aboard!

John Favate presented a poster on the changes in gene expression in the E. coli LTEE at the From Molecular Basis to Predictability and Control of Evolution conference at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, Sweden from June 30 - July 13, 2019.

We are super excited to announce that our lab's research will be supported by an NSF/BBSRC grant awarded to Edward Wallace, Liana Lareau, and us. The NSF grant will support RiboViz development for more robust pipelines, better visualization, more organisms, and new statistical and analytical tools.

Suknaya Das attended the North East Regional Yeast meeting (NERY) at University at Buffalo, SUNY from June 20th - 21st.

Suknaya Das was elected as the Secretary for Molecular Biosciences Graduate Student Organization (MBGSO). The Molecular Biosciences program is the umbrella program through which most life-sciences faculty at Rutgers recruit students. Congratulations Sukanya!

Suknaya Das volunteered at the Rutgers Day celebrations this year by working at the DNA extraction booth for kids. She taught how to extract DNA from fruits and plants.

Sadhana Chidambaran has been accepted for the Summer Student Program program at Jackson Labs.

We are excited that to announce the arrival of the second lab baby - Tia Shah. Although Tia will be my first child, the lab is quick to remind me that in fact, she will be fifth -- after the 4 current grad babies. Welcome!

John Favate presented a poster on the changes in gene expression in the E. coli LTEE at the Evolution in Philadelphia Conference in Philadelphia on September 08, 2018.

Kirti Gupta starts as a postdoc in the Shah Lab this Fall. She comes to us after defending a very productive Ph.D. in Molecular and Structural Biology at CDRI, India in Dr. Saman Habib, where identified and characterized ribosomal assembly factors involved in the organellar ribosome biogenesis in Plasmodium falciparum. In the Shah Lab Kirti will be developing some cool new methods to study dynamics of translation initiation and co-transcriptional translation. We are really excited to have you. Welcome aboard!

And like clockwork, all three of incoming graduate students have passed their quals this summer (not that this was ever in doubt). Congratulations!

So, while I was away on vacation, the lab got a new 3D printer. Check out what they made. We will be adding details on how to make several lab tools here and our experience troubleshooting the prints.

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We are really excited and also a bit sad to see the amazing Sagara join the Md/PhD program at Indiana University. He will be leaving us soon. In the short time, Sagara was in the lab as an undergrad tech, he contributed to 4 papers. Good luck and godspeed!

Woah! The core lab basically doubled this week. We have three new graduate students joining the lab - Sukanya Das, John Favate, and Alex Salibi. So much cool science to look forward to.

Sadhana Chidambaran has been accepted for the Summer Research Experience program at NIMBioS at my alma mater UTK. She will be among a cohort of 15 fellows. She will be using phylogenetics to understand cancer tumor evolution while working with Mike Gilchrist and Brian O'Meara.

Update:

Here is a participant profile of Sadhana.

I guess when it rains, it pours! We are thrilled that NIDDK R01 submitted by our collaborator Anil Rustgi at UPenn will be funded. We will receive a subaward to study the role of post-transcriptional regulation by LIN28B-IMP1 in oncogenic signalling in intestines.

Ritu Gupta from Sunil Laxman's lab at inStem is visiting the lab. She will be studying the role of tRNA thiolation on metabolism and cell cycle using ribosome-profiling.

We are super excited (and a bit relieved) to announce that our lab's research will be supported by an NIH R35 grant (ESI-MIRA) for the next 5 years. We now have several open positions for both postdocs and graduate students. Informal enquiries welcome!

Sagara Wijeratne starts as a lab assistant in the Shah Lab. He will be developing computational pipelines for analyzing ribosome-profiling datasets, while preparing to join MD/PhD programs for his graduate studies. Welcome aboard!

Yay! Tongji Xing passed her qualifying exam with flying colors today. She will be working on building and studying integrated models of transcription and translation for her dissertation.

We are excited that to announce the arrival of the first lab baby - Eleanor Kasza. Huge congratulations to Tongji Xing and Thomas Kasza!

We are very thrilled that Tongji Xing has decided to join the Shah Lab for her Ph.D. She is going to study dynamics of protein synthesis for her graduate studies.

We are excited that Tongji Xing is going to be rotating in the Shah Lab for the next two months. She is currently developing computational tools for analyzing ribosome-profiling datasets.

Welcome to the lab Tongji!

Premal will be training on how to become an effective teacher/instructor at 2016 Hemsley/National Academies Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching at UConn.

Immediately following the Summer Institute, Premal will be traveling to Austin, TX to attend the Evolution meeting.

The lab has doubled in size, again!

Two fantastic genetics majors - Albert Sultan and Darya Pavlenko - have joined the Shah Lab. Albert's research will focus on how genomic GC content influences amino acid usage and therefore protein evolution. Darya's reserach will focus on the role of context-dependence on codon usage in bacteria.

Our paper on how epistatis in fitness landscapes reduces the rates of reversion in evolution, in collaboration with David McCandlish and Josh Plotkin is out in Genetics.

Our latest and greatest coffee machine - Gaggia Anima Prestige is here.

The lab has doubled in size!

We are very excited that Shun Liang has joined the group as a lab manager. She is going to be our de facto wet lab czar. She is currently setting up the lab and learning ribosome-profiling experiments.