News

Welcome to our new lab members!  Hyung Bum Kim is a new postdoc joining us after finishing his PhD at UT Southwestern.  He's planning to study Mediator using single-molecule microscopy.  And Ece Serdaroglu is an undergraduate from Yale University joining us as a BCMP Summer Scholar.  She's helping us work up a new method for fluorescently labeling proteins for imaging.

Check out our paper in eLife showing that untethering the TFIIH kinase from the core module results in widespread CTD phosphorylation throughout transcription. Congratulations to Gabby and Robin, and many thanks to our collaborators in the François Robert lab!

We're very proud of our former PhD student Nihal Terzi (Cizmecioglu), who just received the TÜBA-GEBİP Award for Young Scientists from the Turkish Academy of Sciences.  Nihal's lab at METU studies developmental epigenetics.

Our new paper describing single molecule studies of activator-Mediator-RNApII interactions is now out in Molecular Cell.  Dan Zhou and Jongcheol Jeon are co-first authors.  The paper helps explain transcription "synergy", where combining two activators work much better than the sum of two individual activators.

James Portman was awarded a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for his work using single-molecule microscopy to study transcription elongation.  Congratulations, James!

Steve was elected to the 2025 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences! 

Working with the Marto Lab, postdocs Deepash Kothiwal and HyunJin Bae produced an improved msCTD system for analyzing phosphorylations on the CTD of RNA pol II subunit Rpb1.  Improved chromatography allows us to separate the different phospho-isoforms for better detection and quantitation. Read about it here in the Journal of Chromatography.

Congratulations to postdoc Madhura De, whose painting entitled "Stop!" was chosen for the HMS Staff Art Show! You can see it, and lots of other amazing artwork, at Countway Library for the next few months.

Jongcheol's paper studying activator-SAGA interactions is now out in NSMB!  

The lab now has two great technicians: Brynn Jacobs is staying for a gap year before heading to medical school, and Mohammed Hijaz just joined us.