MB Trainees Accomplishments Summer 2025
Doctoral Defenses:
Wendy Aquino Nunez (Brian Ackley’s lab) defended her PhD dissertation entitled “Tauopathy in a Worm: Establishing and Applying a C. elegans Model for Studying Age-Linked tau aggregation” on July 10, 2025.
Eldric Carreon (Kristi Neufeld’s lab) defended his PhD dissertation entitled, “A role for Adenomatous Polyposis Coli in Cellular Response to UV” on July 18, 2025.
Presentations:
Two MB graduate students and a postdoc from the Lunquist lab attended the 25th International Worm Meeting held June 28 to July 2 at U.C. Davis, CA.
- CJ Gormly presented a poster entitled “A non-apoptotic role of EGL-1 and CED-4 to inhibit anterior QL.a and QL.p migration downstream of MAB-5/Hox"
- Vedant Jain presented a poster entitled “EFN-4 and VAB-8 act downstream of MAB-5/Hox to promote QL cell migration”
- Felipe Texeira (Postdoc) made an oral presentation entitled “ : Single-cell transcriptomic profiling of the Q neuroblast lineage during migration and differentiation”
Seven MB graduate students attended the 12th annual KU Cancer Center Cancer Biology Research Program Meeting on July 31 in Olathe Kansas
One student gave an oral presentation:
- Anika James (Kristi Neufeld lab), “Nuclear APC Maintains Colon Homeostasis and Mitigates Inflammation”
and six students gave poster presentations:
- Asbin Chand (Yoshi Azuma lab), “Haspin Kinase Regulates a Topoisomerase II-Dependent Metaphase Checkpoint Critical for Chromosome Segregation”
- Priyani Hapugaswatta (Mizuki Azuma lab), “Chromosomal Instability in Ewing Sarcoma”
- Laia Terencia Hernandez (Kristi Neufeld lab), “A Role for APC in ROS-induced DNA Damage Response”
- Anika James (Kristi Neufeld lab), “Nuclear APC maintains colon homeostasis and mitigates inflammation”
- Bikash Pokhrel (Kristi Neufeld lab), “Musashi1 Affects mTORC Pathway, Potentially Controlling Growth of Intestinal Epithelium”
- Evan Schulz (Mizuki Azuma lab), “Role of Ewing Sarcoma Proteins in the Mitotic Spindle”