News

Jing-Ke Weng discusses with Science for the Public about the process, the discoveries, and the challenge of simulating plant chemistry for large-scale medical purposes.

Jeandele Elliot spent the summer studying a durable compound in pollen and developing equally durable friendships, an article by Saima Sidik.

A big shout-out for the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), which has had a longstanding impact on many students who came through the program over the years (see MIT News). We are honored to have participated in the program as a host lab in the past years. Great to have hosted Jeandele Elliot this summer, who is a chemical engineering student from Howard University. We look forward to seeing her doing fantastic things in the years to come!

The Weng lab says farewell to Roland, who is moving to University of Michigan to start his own lab. Roland is the first faculty hire through the University of Michigan’s Inaugural Biosciences Initiative, and will join faculty of the College of Pharmacy’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry. Congrats!!

Associate Professor Jing-Ke Weng of the Whitehead Institute and MIT is the recipient of a $1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to develop new biotechnologies that enable directed evolution of metabolic enzymes at will. If successful, this project will have a transformative impact upon multiple fields by enabling the unprecedented capability to create new designer medicines and commodity chemicals.

Tomas’ paper on elucidation of kavalactone biosynthesis in Polynesian medicinal plant kava kava is published at Nature Plants. See the news release from MIT News here and NPR here.

Unusual Labmates is a multimedia series exploring some of the uncommon species used for research at Whitehead Institute. The recent entry features fireflies, including the American species Photinus pyralis and the Japanese species Aquatica lateralis, which the Weng lab is using to better understand the ability to emit light. Click here to experience a multimedia story about fireflies, including how we rear them in the lab and what we hope to learn from investigating their biology.

We warmly welcome Jeandele Elliot from Howard University, Uriel Garcia and George Yacoub from Williams College to carry out summer research in the lab!

We warmly welcome Colin Kim, our very first Biological Engineering student, and Wentao Huang of Biology to join the lab!

Yasmin Chau, Tim Fallon and Geoff Liou successfully defended their PhD thesis in May. Congratulations to all three for this monumental career achievement!