News

Roland Kersten’s paper on discovery and engineering of plant lyciumin-type branched cyclic peptides is out today. Check out the paper here, and the news release from Whitehead Institute.

“To make better biomedical research tools, a grad student picks apart fireflies’ glow“—STAT news of The Boston Globe covers our latest paper on sequencing and analyzing the firefly genomes.

Jing-Ke Weng is one of the five recipients of the Inaugural Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award. Building on the successful 25-year history of the Smith Family Awards Program for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the Foundation created the Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award in 2017 to fuel creativity and innovation in junior investigators in the basic sciences. The Odyssey Awards support the pursuit of high-impact ideas to generate breakthroughs and drive new directions in biomedical research. The awards fund high-risk, high-reward pilot projects solicited from the brightest junior faculty in the region.

Jing-Ke Weng was selected by the Research Corporation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as a 2018 Scialog Fellow on Chemical Machinery of the Cell.

First-year graduate student Matthew Hill joins the Weng lab. Welcome! Matthew is a native of Massachusetts, and did summer research in our lab back in 2016, when he was still an undergraduate student at Purdue University. We are glad to recruit him back!

Our awesome UROP Chun-Ting (Jack) Liu wins the 2018 Merck Prize of the MIT Biology Department, which is given annually to one biology undergraduate student for outstanding research and academic performance in biophysical or bioinfomatics sciences. Big congrats!

Jing-Ke Weng was a featured speaker and panelist in the forum of Origins: Earth’s Journey Toward Life held at Carnegie Institution for Science on April 9th, 2018.

Sophia Xu receives the 2018 NSF graduate research fellowship! Big congrats!

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. For the 2018 competition, NSF received over 12,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers.

Tomas’s review article on natural product modulators of human sensations and mood is the featured cover article in the upcoming issue of Chemical Society Reviews. Please check out this very cool and comprehensive paper!

The Weng lab and the Fujita lab report using a ‘crystalline sponge’ to streamline the structural analysis of complex natural products from milligram quantities in crude mixtures. Please check out the paper here.