Congratulations to Eric, who is the first Hodges lab trainee to receive competitive funding! Eric was selected for the Gulf Coast Consortia/Keck Center's T32 training program in Precision Environmental Health (TPEHS). Well done Eric!
Courtney was appointed as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. We're looking forward to more interactions with the superb students and faculty in the Bioengineering department!
Our research proposal was selected for funding by the V Foundation! This high-profile two-year award will enable us to make important discoveries to tackle high-risk neuroblastoma. We are grateful for the support of the V Foundation.
Congratulations to Pavlos and our other colleagues for our recent paper updating the consensus guidelines for clinical management of renal medullary carcinoma (RMC). These important guidelines are intended to improve clinical management of RMC, a deadly kidney cancer defined in part by loss of SMARCB1. Criteria for ongoing and upcoming RMC clinical trials are also presented.
Congratulations to Katerina for her beautifully illustrated review of new chemical biology tools for chromatin. Degraders, dimerizers, a comprehensive table of chromatin inhibitors (and more)!
This month, we published two papers in PNAS with collaborators from Georgetown University, UCSD, the IOCB in Prague, and KU Leuven in Belgium. The first paper reveals how interaction partners of LEDGF/p75 (PSIP1, an H3K36me3 reader) are regulated by kinases. The second reveals how cAMP binding regulates the activity of protein kinase A (PKA).
Our research proposal was selected for funding by the Gabrielle's Angel Foundation for Cancer Research. This high-profile, three-year award will enable us to make important discoveries to tackle an aggressive childhood leukemia.
Salma Mahmoud joined our lab as a postdoc. Salma earned her PhD with Tom Owen-Hughes at Wellcome Trust (University of Dundee), and joins us following a postdoc with Coralie Poizat. Welcome, Salma!
Our lab is the newest member of the BCM Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research (CIBR) Center! We are very excited to join the productive group of computational biologists at Baylor College of Medicine.
Eric Smith from the MCB graduate program joined our lab as a graduate student. Welcome, Eric!
Our lab is the newest member of the MD Anderson Center for Cancer Epigenetics!
Our paper on dominant-negative Brg1 mutations is now online at Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Congratulations to all of the authors!
Katerina presented her work as a short talk on short linear motifs (SLiMs) after Roger Kornberg's keynote at the EMBO/EMBL Meeting, "The Nucleosome: From Atoms to Genomes." Congratulations, Katka!
Courtney was awarded a $2 million faculty recruitment award from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). This recruitment award supports very promising emerging investigators pursuing first faculty appointment, who are prepared to make outstanding contributions to the field of cancer research.
Courtney was awarded the Holly and Gerald N. Wogan Award for Scientific Research Excellence at the 31st Aspen Cancer Conference. This award was based on his work presented at the conference as a Fellow of the Aspen Cancer Conference.
Courtney was awarded the Charles B. Carrington Memorial Prize at the Department of Pathology annual research retreat, Stanford University School of Medicine. These awards come with a generous cash prize, supported by the Charles B. Carrington Memorial Fund and the Cheryl Whitlock Pathology Prize.
Courtney was selected to present at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) as an AACR NextGen Star. In addition to travel support, these awards provide an exciting opportunity to increase the visibility of early-career scientists at the AACR Annual Meeting and to support the professional development and advancement of those selected to speak.
Courtney was selected for the "Best Talk" award at the 37th Annual Stanford Cancer Biology Conference, for his talk entitled "Chromatin accessibility underlies the tumor suppression role of BAF (mSWI/SNF) complexes in human cancer."
Courtney's K99/R00 (Pathway to Independence) grant proposal, entitled "Dynamic effects of cancer mutations on the mammalian SWI/SNF ATPase Brg," was selected to be funded by the National Cancer Institute. The purpose of the NIH K99/R00 program is to increase and maintain a strong cohort of new and talented, NIH-supported, independent investigators. This grant will fund Courtney's transition to an independent researcher.