What’s Happening Around the Lab?
(click on photos for enlargements)
THE LAB MEETS THE WEB MASTER
August 23, 2024
The lab meets the web master (Sam’s dad)!
Bringing biology and crispr technologies to >100 middle schoolers
August 8th, 2024
Lab members volunteered with multiple classrooms in the East Meadow school district to lead activities in microbiome sampling, BioArt with fluorescent E. coli strains, DNA modelling, DNA extraction, and science trivia. It was a lot of fun!!
STERNBERG LAB WINS AT NUCLEATE BIOTECH PITCH COMPETITION
May 10th, 2024
George and Diego (along with teammates Tyler and Antonio) win the Alnylam prize at the Nucleate Demo Day. Nucleate is an activator program that empowers next generation biotech founders by providing initiatives to support academics finding their first footing in the biotech industry. The team pitched a mock startup they call CAST Biosciences that leverages CRISPR-associated transposons (CAST) as a therapeutic avenue for treating diseases.
RED PILL OR BLUE PILL?
May 9th, 2024
The lab made a poster to celebrate Sam’s promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, which coincided with the preprint publication of the lab’s discovery of neo genes created by DRT2 antiphage defense systems. Confused? Watch The Matrix (and read Tang et al., 2024)!
THEY ESCAPED!
May 7th, 2024
The team put their brains together and, to no surprise, easily broke out of the escape room. What a clever group! P. S. The suspense of the escape was of course held till the very last minute, just to make the game more interesting (or so we’d like to think).
STERNBERG LAB JOINS HHMI FAMILY
April 16th, 2024
A sunny spring day becomes even brighter after getting the good news. A tremendous day for celebrating the lab's hard work and multiple achievements! True champions (the champagne agrees)
HENRY BECOMES A LION
April 15, 2024
After long deliberation and many great opportunities, Henry Le made the correct choice of picking Columbia as his home for his Ph.D.!
MOBILE LAB
March 1, 2024
For a lab that studies mobile genetic elements, the emergence of a mobile lab bench was inevitable. Here, Stephen and George improvised on the fly as they set up the lab’s first (successful) Nanopore sequencing run!
SAM MEETS THE FIRST STERNBERG LAB-MINTED PROFESSOR
February 11, 2024
On his way to his well-deserved annual vacation (probably sprinkled with a few Zoom meetings), Sam stopped over in Singapore and caught up with Professor Leslie Beh. Leslie was the first PostDoc who joined the lab in 2020 and turned out to win the race to become the first PI ‘Made in Sternberg Lab’ (among other training labs, of course). After finding out our Illumina sequencing kits are manufactured in Southeast Asian city, Leslie joined Illumina Singapore for 2 years before becoming a faculty member at A*STAR IMCB and is now working on RNA modifications.
Lab members head to Banff!
January 24th, 2024
Several members of the lab traveled to Banff, Canada, to attend the Keystone Precision Genome Engineering Conference! Tanner shared his recent bioinformatic discoveries, and we took a break to hit the slopes and meet up with a lab alumnus, Tyler.