Category: Postdoctoral Research Award

Postdoctoral Research Award 2013

Gaelen Burke, postdoctoral research fellow in entomology, has made major contributions to her field since joining Michael Strand’s lab at UGA. Her professional interests are interdisciplinary, and revolve around the study of insect-microbial interactions. Burke’s research focuses on the mutually beneficial relationship between parasitoid wasps and a class of virus known as polydnaviruses. The wasps incorporate the genome of the virus into their own genome, and when females inject eggs into the body cavity of caterpillars, the virus protects the egg by suppressing the caterpillar’s immune system, which would otherwise attack and destroy the foreign object. Burke’s research focuses on the study of persistent viral infections using these insects as models to understand how viruses persist in populations while circumventing the host’s immune system. While traditional virology research focuses primarily on disease causing viruses, Burke’s research promises to show that persistent viruses are both common and important for understanding animal immunity and disease.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2013

Amar Singh, postdoctoral research associate in biochemistry and molecular biology, has been a highly productive researcher since joining Stephen Dalton’s lab. His research interests focus on human embryonic stem cells and human induced pluripotent stem cells. While these fundamental building blocks of life show great promise as potential therapies for a number of diseases, disorders and traumas, scientists do not yet fully understand the mechanisms that govern them. Singh has made great strides in the field’s understanding of elements controlling two critical functions: stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. Self-renewal refers to a stem cell’s ability to divide continuously in a culture. Differentiation refers to its ability to form all different cell types. Singh’s work describes a new paradigm for how different signals interact to promote self-renewal. Furthermore, using a new and powerful system called a fluorescent-ubiquitinated cell cycle indicator, or FUCCI, Singh monitors stem cell transitions and is able to better understand how the cell cycle in human pluripotent stem cells regulates self-renewal and differentiation.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2012

Jonathan Gent, postdoctoral fellow in plant biology, has been a highly productive researcher since joining the Dawe lab at UGA. Upon his arrival, Gent initiated a long-term project to identify genes that control the number of active centromeres, the regions of chromosomes that direct their behavior during cell division. While working on this, Gent also began studying other aspects of chromosome structure in and near centromeres, and he has made multiple discoveries and published two papers, all within the first two years of his arrival. In addition to carrying on his original project, Gent is currently studying structural features at the boundaries of intergenic regions of chromosomes (the regions between genes). He is also working closely with graduate and undergraduate students, training them in bench work and bioinformatics.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2011

Yuping He, assistant research scientist in physics, has made major contributions to the growth, characterization, and application of nanostructures. Particularly notable is her development of a novel fabrication technique called “dynamic shadowing growth,” and her application of this technique to the fabrication of catalytic nanomotors. She has advanced the glancing angle deposition (GLAD) and has made several other significant contributions to nanostructured thin film deposition and renewable energy research. She demonstrated for the first time that by alternating the deposition materials during GLAD, three dimensional multilayered heteronanorod arrays can be fabricated and designed. She discovered the NIR-induced color change of WO3 nanoflakes. More important, she contributed to the study of novel nanoscale hydrogen storage materials and Si-based nanostructured battery anodes. She has already published 20 journal papers on nanoscience research.

Postdoctoral Research Award 2011

Adam Barb, a postdoctoral research associate in the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, completed a project that involved remodeling the glycans of immunoglobulin domains with sugars labeled with magnetically active isotopes. He used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) data on the isotopes to characterize the accessibility of the glycans to receptors and enzymes.

His most recent work, on the dynamic influence of N-glycan on the Immunoglobulin G Fc fragment, is a major breakthrough in the glycan field. It revealed a previously unobserved protein functional state — and provided the first concrete example of glycan-mediated conformational events. Barb has developed a research proposal that would investigate the structure, function and dynamics of glycoproteins by NMR, which would not only fill a void in solution NMR studies but have a major impact on human health.