2022 Our lab is emerging strong from the pandemic

A new year, and new opportunities. We are looking forward to an exciting 2022-3 academic year, which promises to be as dynamic, exciting, and eventful as the prepandemic years. Sadly, two postdocs are moving on from the group, Dave Jukam is off to biotech and Mardo Koivomagi is off to start his own lab at the NIH. We expect to hear great things from them in the future. Two new students joined this past year. Crystal joined us from Bionengineering and Lucas from Electrical Engineering and we are excited to welcome them to our interdisciplinary team. Working on complex questions like how cell size is computed and the relationship between genome and cell size requires all kinds of expertise from all across the academic disciplines. From mathematics to molecular, cell and systems biology, all are welcome to explore options to join our group. If you are interested please contact Jan

2021: A new year; a new beginning with a still awesome lab

I wanted to write a short post here lauding the efforts of my laboratories members. People have done a heroic job in difficult circumstances (working in low density shifts starting at 7 and ending at 2) to keep the flame alive and make progress on our key questions. We have submitted several papers recently - more on that in other posts - where many of the experiments were done in these conditions. Let’s hope the virus numbers keep coming down so we can start to close this difficult chapter. I, for one, and so excited about the prospect of starting to go back to normal.

Evgeny and my review on animal cell size control is now officially published! With beautiful cover art

Check out this cover! I like the marbles because the remind me of my old collection. Each type has its perfect characteristic size, much like cells. Very nice work on the editing by the team at Trends in Genetics. Here is a link to the article: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1av0ZcQbIzDRp

It may be the wrong time to consider this, but maybe not. Donate to the Andreas Doncic fund for student travel fund now!

Andreas was the first postdoc in my lab and instrumental in everything we have achieved. He passed away a bit over a year ago in a traffic accident. It was very untimely. There is something wrong when a funeral has both the deceased’s mother and daughter attending… Sandy Schmidt, the head of the department he worked in as an assistant prof. after leaving our lab, is organizing a memorial fund to support student travel to conferences. Obviously, this won’t be happening right away with the COVID-19 outbreak. But, this outbreak will eventually end, and supporting Ph.D. student travel to conferences is a worthy cause… I sincerely doubt we can replace real human interactions with Twitter or Facebook. I think the evidence is already in with respect to that question. So, if you have the time, write a check and mail it to the fund as I just did. I’ve posted Sandy’s email with the description of how to do so below.

Warmest regards,

Jan

Dear Colleagues:

I have initiated the establishment of the above-named endowment in honor of the memory of Andreas Doncic. Funds distributed from the endowment shall be used to support the travel and/or meeting related expenses to enable postdoctoral or graduate students in the Department of Cell Biology or the Green Center for Systems Biology to present their research at professional conferences and scientific meetings in accordance with the Rules and Regulations and applicable policies of the Board. The award of available funds will be determined by the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology in consultation with the Director of the Green Center for Systems Biology based on scientific excellence and need.

Thanks to generous contribution pledges from Gaudenz Danuser and Rama Ranganathan, we are 70% along the way to obtaining the $20,000 minimum needed to establish this endowment at UT Southwestern.  I am hoping to reach (or exceed) our goal before I leave at the end of May. 

If you are willing to contribute, and any amount is welcome, then checks should be made out to UT Southwestern Medical Center with an attached note that directs the gift to the Andreas Doncic Memorial Travel Award. Checks should be mailed directly to:

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Office of Development

P.O. Box 910888

Dallas, TX  75391-0888

Please feel free to forward this announcement on to any other colleagues you think would be interested in contributing. I hope you agree that this is a worthy means to permanently embed Andreas’ spirit and love for talking about science into the cultures of our department and center. 

Sandy

Sandra Schmid
Cecil H. Green Distinguished Professor in Cellular and Molecular Biology
Chair, Cell Biology Department 
UT Southwestern Medical Center

Take a break from the Zombie Apocalypse and read Mimi's nice paper out in Current Biology!

It is a beautiful study based on data from Valentina Greco’s lab, which looks directly at cell size control of epithelial stem cells in the mouse epidermis. Cell size at birth is inversely correlated with the amount of growth in the cell cycle to produce the strongest cell size control ever observed in a mammalian cell (of course this raises all kinds of questions regarding the culture models we and others are habitually using). Read all about it!

The paper is available here:

https://www-sciencedirect-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/science/article/pii/S0960982219316951?dgcid=author