Maya Vaishnaw (rising Junior at Concord Academy) completed her 6 week internship in the lab. She did a fantastic job, and we all wish her the best in her future endeavors!
News
June 2016
Maya Vaishnaw joins the lab from Concord Academy for 6 weeks as a summer intern!
The lab attends Boston Bacterial Meeting at MIT.
Joe & Zac and Todd present posters there and their posters were swamped by interested attendees!
The Nair lab returns to Medford High School
We engaged and educated Honors Biology students (freshman and sophomores) about Chemical & Biological Engineering and Synthetic Biology. This time we expanded our effort from last year to a three-day module where the students got to transform a reporter plasmid into E. coli and generate an arabinose biosensor! They then used this biosensor for a CSI-style investigation into to identify the “ground zero” of a Intestinal Candidiasis infection that is being spread downriver by infected patients. Slides for Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and transformation protocol are available for others to use. Thanks again for Karen O’Hagan (Tufts), Ms. Audrey Feitor (MHS), and Mr. Rocco Cieri (MHS) for working with us on this! Pictures from our visit are below:
Dr. Nair explains how engineering and science are distinct, but related. Also explaining how engineering design principles are used to build a living sensor.
The students use a UV box to identify patients with Candidiasis that test positive with their engineered biosensor.
Venkatesh, Todd, Zac, and Cassidy discuss their experience with engineering with the students.
May 2016
Congratulations to Marilyn, Kaelyn, and Jeremy, who are graduating this Spring. We wish them the best in their future endeavors!
March 2016
The lab attends ACS BIOT meeting in San Diego, CA
Dr. Nair presents two talks: “Discovery and Design of Novel Regulatory Noncoding RNA in Bacteria” and “SelFi: Selection Finder for the Directed Evolution of Enzymes”
Venkatesh also presents his work at ACS BIOT in San Diego, CA: “Re-engineering Signal Transduction Enables Efficient Nutrient Assimilation”
Dr. Nair also enjoyed catching up with former labmate Dr. Zengyi Shao (now at Iowa State University), Dr. Xueyang Feng (now at Virginia Tech), and mentor Dr. Huimin Zhao (University of Illinois, Urbana)
December 2015
Neda presents a poster on her work on SelFi (Selection Finder) for Directed Evolution of Enzymes at CABI 2015 (Computational Aspects of Biological Information) held by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA.
