O’Brien Lab Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Tony Galenza has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Congratulations, Tony!
Tony and his celebratory cupcakes
O'Brien Lab has a blast at Drosophila Conference in San Diego!
First in-person conference since COVID! The O'Brien Lab was out and about at the 2022 Drosophila Research Conference in San Diego, soaking up the hot sun and even hotter science. We also got to share some of our own latest work: from Lucy's plenary to Tony's platform talk, Jason's workshop talk and Aparna's virtual poster. Thanks to the awesome #Dros22 organizers for a fantastic meeting!
Miriam, Jason, Tony, and Takao in the SoCal sunshine
Lucy’s plenary talk
Jason’s platform talk about his graduate work
Jason, Miriam, and Elsa supporting the speakers
Great company and great food!
Welcome, Takao!
The O'Brien Lab is thrilled to welcome a new post-doc, who joined our lab in April! Takao Ito obtained his Ph.D. in Tumor biology from Kyoto University in Japan in 2021. In his grad work, he used the Drosophila imaginal disc to study how tumor cells overcome cellular senescence. In the O’Brien lab, he plans to investigate cellular senescence during aging of the Drosophila adult midgut. Takao arrived with a postdoc fellowship already in hand from the Naito Foundation. Welcome, Takao!
Fly Cell Atlas is live!
Tabula Drosophilae! The dream of a Fly Cell Atlas is now peer-reviewed reality! This fantastic resource provides deep genetic and genomic insights at the single-cell level for EVERY cell type in the adult fruit fly. Putting this together took single-cell nuclei sequencing enabled by CZ Biohub and 134 folks from >30 fly labs around the world who contributed diverse expertise in countless ways. As one part of this massive effort, we are proud to have been the FCA ‘gut lab’. Thousands of gut dissections done by our team’s hands, and our own Anthony Galenza led annotation of the digestive tract clusters. You can parse the data at the Fly Cell Atlas website here and check out the paper here.
Overview of the FlyCellAtlas, and focus on the gut.
Fly Cell Atlas: https://flycellatlas.org/
Publication: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abk2432
Our newest PhD Candidate!
Congratulations to Dev Bio grad student Miriam Sun for acing her qualifying exam! The lab celebrated Miriam’s success with cake in the beautiful California sunshine.
Miriam will be working on dynamics of Notch signaling during fate determination, building upon the prior work of lab alum (and former Dev Bio grad student) Erin Sanders.
Lucy and Miriam, celebrating after she crushed her qualifying exam.
No post-quals party would be complete without some delicious cake!
Lucy O'Brien joins Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine
Lucy has been appointed as primary faculty to the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. She looks forward to more interactions with both basic and clinical stem cell colleagues and is excited to be part of the Stem Cell Graduate Program. Congratulations Lucy!
Stanford ISCRM: https://med.stanford.edu/stemcell/institutefaculty.html
Lucy O'Brien named a CZBiohub Investigator!
We are excited that our fearless PI has been named a new CZBiohub Investigator. Congratulations, Lucy!
This award will propel our work on in vivo live imaging of stem cells, their progeny, and the organ-scale dynamics of these diverse ensembles as we create 4D atlases of organs with single-cell resolution.
Lucy is one of 86 Bay Area investigators selected for their potential to contribute “innovative and visionary research…to help solve critical challenges in biomedicine”; read more about this amazing group here: https://www.czbiohub.org/investigator-competition-2021/
Boba makes the fly work light! The O’Brien lab after an outing to get boba tea.
Jason Millington Awarded Fellowship!
O’Brien Lab Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Jason Millington has been awarded the Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship! Congratulations, Jason!
Farewell, Erin!
Erin is a few weeks into her new job, but graciously came back so we could give her a proper celebratory send-off. Also an occasion to toast the arrival of our new postdoc Jason Millington! We played Bocce with varying levels of aplomb and then enjoyed a leisurely lunch in Los Gatos.
Goofing off after some fiercely competitive Bocce ball.
Welcome Jason!
Jason Millington has joined as a postdoc in the O’Brien and Huang labs. He obtained his Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of British Columbia in Canada in 2021. In his thesis, he studied the mechanisms underlying sex differences in growth during development in Drosophila, with a particular focus on how dietary nutrition differentially affects growth in males and females. He joined Stanford co-supervised between the O’Brien and Huang labs in October 2021. His research focuses on investigating how the cells of the gut interact with gut microbes.