News

2019

August: Maya Weissman joins the lab and the EEB PhD program from San Diego State University. Welcome Maya!
August: Eugene presents at SMBE in Manchester, UK.
June: Eugene and Dan present at the Evolution Meetings, conveniently held in Providence, RI!
May: Ryan Bronson (ScB '19) presents her senior thesis and heads to the Broad Institute. She is going far and will be missed!
January: Eugene's paper Migration promotes mutator alleles in subdivided populations appears in Evolution!

2018

December: Eugene and Scott's paper Sign of selection on mutation rate modifiers depends on population size appears in PNAS!
August: David Morgan joins the lab and the EEB PhD program from WPI via Mass General. Welcome David!
September: Eugene's paper Genomic clustering of fitness-affecting mutations favors the evolution of chromosomal instability appears in Evolutionary Applications. Yay!
August: Yinghong successfully defends her thesis Genetic features that protect natural populations from being overwhelmed by deleterious mutations. Great job! Now off to Yelp! (Another great job!)
February: Jacob Jaffe's ('17) slightly reworked senior thesis appears as The Influence of Higher-Order Epistasis on Biological Fitness Landscape Topography in the Journal of Statistical Physics special issue on biological evolution. Thanks also very much to Yinghong and Robert Heckendorn for their contributions!

2017

November: Chris's first thesis chapter Variability in Fitness Effects Can Preclude Selection of the Fittest appears in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics!
August: The NSF funds RII Track-2 FEC: Using Biophysical Protein Models to Map Genetic Variation to Phenotypes to PI Marty Ytrberg at the University of Idaho, together with collaborators at University of Vermont and Brown.
May: Chris Graves successfully defends his PhD entitled The evolutionary consequences of heterogeneous selection in microbes. Great job!
January: Former postdoc Jen Knies demonstrates her protein biochemistry chops by bringing Enzyme Efficiency but Not Thermostability Drives Cefotaxime Resistance Evolution in TEM-1 β-Lactamase to completion in MBE. Thanks due too to second author Fei Cai '12.

2016

February: Genetically Determined Variation in Lysis Time Variance in the Bacteriophage φX174, our first undergrad-led publication appears, representing 3 generations of awesome Brown undergrad efforts in the group along with talented and motivated Providence high school teacher! H/t in particular to Chris Baker '12 for carrying this exciting project across the finish line. Thanks also to our couldn't-hope-for-better collaborators at the University of Idaho: Craig Miller and the late Paul Joyce, as well as the many contributions of Meghan Hollibaugh Baker, then of the Providence Career and Technical Academy.
January: NSF DEB funds our proposal Collaborative Research: Risk and reward of high mutation rate: why large populations favor mutators while small populations inhibit them to explore our hypothesis that natural selection may favor mutators in large populations but disfavor the same mutation in small populations. An exciting collaboration with postdocs Scott Wylie and Eugene Raynes at Brown and Paul Sniegowski at Penn.

2015

September, Dan speaks in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
May: Dan speaks at the Boston Evolution Supergroup, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
April: Dan speaks in the Ecology and Evolution Graduate Program, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
February 12, 2015: Chris is awarded an NSF DDIG! Congratulations, Chris!

2014

August 1, 2014: Chintan Modi, Ph.D. joins the group as a postdoc from Misha Matz' lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
July 22 - September 21, 2014: Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB hosts Superbug14, an extended workshop on drug resistance evolution co-organized by Ville Mustonen (Wellcome Trust), Richard Neher (MPI Tübingen) and Dan Weinreich. Almost 150 participants enjoyed 75 lectures on drug resistance evolution in viruses, bacteria, malaria and cancer. Wow!
June 18 - 21, 2014: Dan and Eugene speak at the innaugural ASM conference on experimental microbial evolution in Washington, DC. Thanks very much to Frank Rosenzweig and Gavin Sherlock for organizing a wonderful and much-needed venue. Looking forward to v2.0 in 2016.
June 15 - 18, 2014: Dan teaches at the Wilhelm und Else Heraeus-Stiftung 556 Summer Course Mechanisms, Strategies, and Evolution of Microbial Systems. Bad Honnef, Germany
June 8 - 12, 2014: Dan and Chintan present at SMBE 2014 in San Juan, PR.
March 3 - 7, 2014: Dan speaks at the APS March meeting in Denver, CO.

2013

2012

July 26, 2012: Yinghong Lan joins the group as a first year graduate student from the University of Science and Technology of China.
July 1, 2012: Eugene Raynes, Ph.D. joins the group as a postdoc from Paul Sniegowski's lab at Penn. He is one of two inaugural Brown CCMB Postdoctoral associates.
March 30, 2012: Chris Graves is awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
March 28, 2012: Alexander Tran '15 receives a Brown PLME SRA award to support his summer research on stop codon read-through in β-lactamase.
March 15, 2012: Lei Ma '13 recieved a Brown UTRA award to support her summer research on the microbiome of caterpillars.
March 10 -11, 2012: Tony Thaweethai '13 and Chris Baker '12 recognized at Northeast Undergraduate Research and Development Symposium (NURDS) for their oral presentation "Estimating and comparing variance in lysis time and burst size within phage populations using a single-phage assay."
February 22 - 25, 2012: Dan speaks at the Cologne Spring Meeting, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
February 1, 2012: Scott Wylie Ph.D. joins the group as a postdoc from Eugene Shakhnovich's lab at Harvard.

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