Prof. Nair goes to the ICBE meeting in Newport Beach, CA! (Jan 6 – 9)
At the International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering, Prof. Nair presented a talk on Venkatesh’s, Sean’s, and Vikas’ work on engineering substrate metabolism in baker’s yeast.

Emma leaves the lab (Dec 17)
Goodbye, Emma! Good luck with your study-abroad next semester in Scottland!

The Nair lab goes to AIChE Annual Meeting! (Oct 28 – Nov 1)
Joe and Vikas make to Pittsburgh, PA safely!

We have a giant get together for lunch with the Zhao lab, its alumni, and their advisees. We took over nearly half the restaurant! Picture coming soon!

Sara (co-advised by Soha Hassoun) presents her talk at the “Integrative Systems Biology” session. (tweet)

Joe presents his work at the “Metabolic Engineering in Non-Model Organisms” session (tweet)

Vikas presents his work at the “Synthetic Biology Applications” session (tweet)

The Tufts iGEM team wins Bronze! (Oct 29)
Huge congratulations to the Tufts iGEM team for winning a bronze medal at the 2018 iGEM Jamboree held in Boston! See all the results here. (tweet)

Prof. Nair gives a seminar at University of Illinois (Sept 13)
It was great to be back at UIUC and present me independent work to my former advisor, Prof. Huimin Zhao, and other mentors and teachers. Thanks for the invitation! (tweet)

The lab welcomes ChBE undergrad Taylor Hart! (Sept 10)
Taylor will be working with Vikas to advance arabinose metabolism in yeast.

Venkatesh’s review on pentose metabolism in yeast is accepted for publication! (Aug 29)
Congrats! The review “Pentose metabolism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: The need to engineer global regulatory systems” will be published later this year in Biotechnology Journal as part of their “Methods and Advances” special issue. (link)

Prof. Nair attends the SIMB Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL! (Aug 12 – 16) (tweet)
The Metabolic Engineering for Fuels and Chemicals Session 1 Prof. Nair convened with Dr. Harry Yim (Genomatica) at Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology was a huge success with excellent talks and fantastic attendance! (tweet 1, tweet 2)

Here’s a pic of a mini Zhao-lab reunion!

New manuscript on bioRxiv! (Aug 7)
A new preprint on bridging the gap between metabolic pathway synthesis and implementation is live on bioRxiv! It’s a joint project with the fantastic Hassoun group! (tweet)

Last few days of REU student Elizabeth Chavez at Tufts. (Aug 3 – 7)
Elizabeth did some fantastic work on the joint project between the Nair and Hassoun labs! Here are some pictures from the goodbye lunch and poster session to conclude the REU for the summer. Good luck with graduation at UNC and we hope to see your PhD application to Tufts! (tweet 1, tweet 2)