2019 News and Events

September

• The Schmidt-Dannert lab drove to Madison Wisconsin to attend the Central US Synthetic Biology Workshop 2019 hosted by Brian Pfleger and Vatsan Raman at UW Madison. Everyone presented their reseach as posters.

August

• Claudia gave a lecture at the Terpnet meeting on  "Exploring the sesquiterpenoid biosynthetic space in Basidiomycota"
• Kelly Wallin and Claudia instructed a lab module on synthetic biology tools at the UMN Itasca Biological Research Station

July

• Ruijie Zhang joins the lab as postdoctoral fellow to work on strain engineering and engineering of new types of biocatalytic materials
• Claudia gave a lecture "Functional Biomaterials for Biocatalysis" at the annual SIMB meeting in Wahsington DC
• Claudia gave a key note lecture "From Biosynthesis to Functional Biomaterials" at the 2019 BioTrans meeting in Groningen, NL. https://biotrans2019.com/
• Guoqiang Zhang's and Timothy Johnston's manuscript "Developing a protein scaffolding system for rapid enzyme immobilization and optimization of enzyme functions for biocatalysis" published in ACS Synth. Biol. (https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.9b00187)

June

• Claudia, Co-PI Al Aksan and postdoc Sunyoung Kang presented research results at the DARPA Engineered Living Materials PI meeting

May

• Timothy Johnston graduated and will begin his Postbaccalaureate training at the NIH
• Azion White received MSROP and UROP fellowships to conduct summer research under the guidance of Francois
• Grayson Wawrzyn, 13' PhD Lab alumn, returned to campus as invited speaker at the NIH Chemical Biology Training Grant Symposium

April

• Two new team members will be joining the lab
• Funding of a new project on engineering living materials for biocatalysis together with the Wackett and Aksan groups

March 

• Sarah Bloch, '14 PhD Lab alumn, was featured in a CBS Blog
• Anaya Pokhrel joins the lab as postdoctoral fellow. He will be working on strain engineering tasks.
• Research Assistant Professor Maureen Quin leaves the lab to begin a new journey in industry as Senior Development Scientist at Beckman Coulter.
• New postdoc ads have been posted - we are looking for 2-3 new postdoc for several new synthetic biology projects in the area of programmable functional protein nanomaterials

February

• Postdoc Seung-oh Seoh (SOS) starts his faculty position as Assistant Professor at the Catholic University in Seol, Korea.
• Sara Bratsch joins our team as postdoctoral fellow to work on biomaterials and strain engineering. 
• Methods Enzymology Volume on Supramolecular Assemblies and Metabolons edited by Claudia and Maureen is published.

January

• "A path less taken" - the Schmidt-Dannert lab received philantropic funding for the desing of innovative, genetically programmable materials
• Postdoc Guoqiang Zhang arrives at Jiangnan University to start his new position as Associate Professor.
• Claudia's and Fernando Lopez-Gallego's review on "Advances and opportunities for the design of self-sufficient and spatially organized cell-free biocatalytic systems" in Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol. In Press.
• Chris Flynn's manuscript on the characterization of the Fusarium terpenome accepted for publication in Fungal Biology.