Stuff to write home 'bout...
2012
- March
- January
- Congratulations to grad student Tomek Kabzinski
on his MSc thesis defense.
2011
- December
-
Grad student Jen Patterson visited
the Kelly Lab at NCSU for a couple days to learn a lot about culturing the
Thermotogales...
- November
-
Grad student Peter Randolph attended
Wyatt Instruments' Light Scattering University in Santa Barbara, CA.
- September
- A sincere welcome to Eli Chen,
who recently graduated from UVa with dual degrees in Music (DMP) and
Chemistry/Biochemistry, and who'll begin a part-time research position
in the lab this month.
-
Funding: Congratulations to all involved
(Gunnoe,
Mura,
Sabat)
for a successful NSF MRI grant proposal, funding the
acquisition of new X-ray diffraction equipment in the Chemistry Department;
of great relevance for StrucBio, this new instrumentation will enable us to
screen the diffraction quality of macromolecular crystal specimens in the
Department. Further information can be found at the
departmental announcement.
- August
-
Grad student Jen Patterson visits the Lowe Lab at UCSC for
a couple weeks of mini-sabbatical, where she learned a lot about
experimental biochemistry with RNA...
-
Congratulations to co-advisee
Chris Lee on receiving a travel
scholarship to attend the NBCR's 2011
Summer Institute.
Chris, who is working
on the development of computational pipelines for automated annotation of
biochemical function for structural genomics targets, was particularly
interested in the computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) and virtual
screening sessions.
- June
- May
-
Congratulations to second-year graduate student Jen Patterson on
receiving the "Best Graduate Poster Presentation" award in the
Structural Biology, Biochemistry & Biophysics section at
the Virginia Academy of Sciences 89th Annual Meeting, held 26-May in Richmond, VA.
-
Congratulations to undergraduate alumna Sarah Ebmeier on being
admitted to graduate school; Sarah will begin PhD studies in the
Molecular, Cell & Developmental Biology program at
Yale University this Fall.
-
Workshop: Several UVaCompBio
undergrads, accompanied by Cameron Mura, attended the
BioTrac40 workshop on "Protein Bioinformatics" at
the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD this 17-20 May.
- April
-
Congratulations to undergraduates Collin Conrad and Kanishk Jain,
who have been awarded departmental Kenneth C. Bass Scholarships for
Summer research.
- February
- January
-
Many thanks to the Jeffress Memorial Trust for renewal of
our grant proposal (J-971) for an additional year.
-
On a related note, please see the new
Philanthropic Contributions
page to become a benefactor of the Mura Lab.
2010
- December
- September
- Congratulations to Cameron Mura
on being chosen as a 2010–2011 UVa Mead Honored Faculty.
The funds will be used to develop a semester-long 'UVaCompBio' series, aimed at introducing upper-level
undergraduates from computer science and the biosciences (biochemistry,
biology, etc.) to this relatively new multidisciplinary area.
More information can be found at the departmental notice
or the Cavalier Daily press release.
- August
-
Publication: "An Introduction to Biomolecular Graphics"
appeared on 26-Aug-2010 in
PLoS Computational Biology;
authors of this work include Cameron Mura and former
undergraduate Colin McCrimmon. An accompanying online
resource has been setup at the PyMOL wiki —
http://pymolwiki.org/PLoS.
-
Software:
Check-out our Software section
for releases and associated information for two projects:
(i)
'PaPy' (Parallel Pipelines in Python) is a
lightweight, Python-based library for creation and deployment of
distributed bioinformatic
workflows; source-code, usage examples, documentation, etc.
are freely available for this toolkit at
http://muralab.org/PaPy.
(ii)
'ZenCogent' refers to our integration of abstracted tools and
generalized data-structures for
macromolecular 3D structural analysis (kD trees for nearest neighbors;
surface calculations; contact patches; etc.) into the feature-rich
PyCogent package for sequence-based bioinformatics and
phylogenetic analyses.
- July
- Congratulations to grad student Peter
Randolph on being accepted to, and attending, the TBCG's "Hands-On" Workshop on Computational Biophysics in San Diego.
- Congratulations to grad student Marcin
Cieslik on having his work accepted for a presentation at
the ISMB2010
bioinformatics meeting in Boston.
- June
- May
- Congratulations to grad student Tomek
Kabzinski on completing his qualifying exams and advancing to candidacy.
- Congratulations to undergraduate Colin
McCrimmon on receiving the Department of
Chemistry's Hugh Miller Spencer Scholarship Award. Colin, who
graduates with dual majors in Chemistry and Biology this month, will
begin MD/PhD studies at UC Irvine next Fall.
- April
-
Congratulations to undergraduate Colin McCrimmon for successfully
defending, on 30-Apr-2010, his thesis as part of the University's
Distinguished Majors Program — "Investigation into the Cause
of Disparate Macromolecular Crystal Space-group Frequencies".
- March
- Congratulations to group member Thien Nguyen
on a successful graduate school application process — Admitted to
a number of programs, Thien will begin her PhD studies in biochemistry
at UC San Diego next Fall.
- Tomasz Wituła, an experimental biochemist
who is currently conducting postdoctoral work in our collaborators'
Biomolecular Machines Laboratory (Univ of Warsaw) will visit us
from 22–28 March.
- January
-
Welcome to two new graduate students,
Jennifer Patterson and Peter Randolph,
who have just joined the lab.
-
The Mura Lab receives, and gratefully acknowledges, a funding award from the
Jeffress Memorial Trust (J-971).
2009
- August
- July
- June
- A sincere welcome to Joanna Panecka,
a biophysics PhD student who will be visiting us this Summer
from the Biomolecular Machines Laboratory at the Univ of Warsaw.
- A sincere welcome to Thien Nguyen,
who just recently graduated from UVa with a BS in Chemistry/Biochemistry,
and who will begin a research position in the lab this month.
- April
- Congratulations to recent undergraduate
Ravi Sood on being admitted to graduate school. Ravi will
begin PhD studies in computer science and computational biology
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Fall 2009.
- Congratulations to recent undergraduate
Daryl Banton on being admitted to medical school at UVa,
where he will begin his studies this Summer/Fall.
- March
-
Congratulations to
undergraduate Colin McCrimmon on receiving a travel award for
the 2009 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) Annual Meeting
this Summer in Toronto, Canada. Colin will present his analyses of
protein crystal space groups.
-
Congratulations to undergraduate Colin McCrimmon on receiving a
2009–2010 Harrison Undergraduate Research Award from UVa.
-
Congratulations to undergraduate Sarah Ebmeier on receiving the NIH's
Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA), funding a two-year research stint in
Bethesda. Sarah graduates with a BS in Biochemistry this Spring and
will begin at NIH in July.
- January
- A warm welcome to the first two graduate
students to join the lab – Marcin Cieślik and
Tomek Kabziński.