2024

June
Vivian Trach joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher from the SCRMC-SURF program

May
Thomas Olender joins the lab as a postdoctoral fellow after completing a PhD at the University of Ottawa

April
Harshi is awarded a F31 predoctoral fellowship from NICHD, Congratulations!

January
Stefan defends his thesis and will stay on in the lab as a postdoctoral scholar. Congratulations!

2023

November
Coral’s work on  DOT1L binding partner AF10 in controlling cell identity is published in Stem Cell Reports

September
Isha Prabhu joins the lab as manager while pursuing a Masters in engineering

Kaashvi Aggarwal joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher

Coral and Xiaoya’s work on DOT1L is published in Science Advances

July
Coral accepts a faculty position in the Dept. of Genetics at Univ. of Alabama- Birmingham. Congratulations – we look forward to discoveries from the Wille lab

June
Caleb defends his thesis and moves on to a Scientist position at Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics here in Madison. Congratulations!

Pratyush Mishra joins the lab for a Khorana summer fellowship

May
Collaborative paper with Roy lab is published in Nature Communications on scMTNI a new method to infer gene regulatory networks.

January
Krithika Senthil  and Harshee Yarlagadda  join the lab as undergraduate researchers, welcome

2022

September
Caleb is chosen to give an oral presentation at the ISSCR symposium on Emerging Therapies

June
Collaborative paper with Roy lab is published in Genome Research

Coral’s review on DOT1L is published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology

May
Amulya graduates and takes a gap year before medical school at Creighton University

March
Harshi gets an Honorable mention for her NSF-GRFP application – Congrats!

February
Coral’s paper is published in Stem cell reports

2021

May
Ellen graduates and moves on to a post baccalaureate position at the NIH. Farewell, we will miss you

Amulya  is awarded a Hilldale undergraduate fellowship and a UW- Genetics and Genomics undergraduate fellowship. Congratulations

February

Caleb is awarded the SCRMC predoctoral fellowship

2020

December
Harshini Cormaty from the Genetics program joins the lab. Welcome

October
Zafirah’s final PhD paper on HP1γ regulates H3K36 methylation and pluripotency in embryonic stem cells is accepted and online at Nucleic Acids Research https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/48/22/12660/6006202

July
Zafirah moves on to perform postdoctoral research in Kristin Baldwin’s lab at Columbia University.  Good luck Zafirah, we will miss you.

April
Collaborative paper with the Engin lab  on dedifferentiation in Type I diabetes with contribution from Stefan is published in Cell Metabolism

March
Zafirah defends her thesis. Congrats Dr. Zaidan! (see pictures- we had a chocolate fountain!)

Ellen is awarded the Genetics and Genomics distinguished undergraduate fellowship to pursue research in our lab. Congrats Ellen!

2019

November
Ellen Morgan (mentor Caleb) joins the lab. Welcome Ellen.

October
Khoa and Caleb’s paper on the link between removing two repressive marks- H3K9 methylation and DNA methylation is online at the EMBO Journal

September
Stefan was awarded second place at the poster session of the Stem Cell Symposium. Congrats!

May
Farewell to undergraduates Niki, Edwin and Simone!

Welcome undergraduates Brenton Halverson from the Wiscience program ( mentor Stefan) and Hailey Thurston from the SURF program ( mentor Caleb)

Published in UW-Madison News: UW Madison Research Team Finds New Ways to Generate Stem Cells More Efficiently

Our paper on single cell trancriptomics of reprogramming in the new high efficiency cocktail of ascorbic acid, Dot1L inhibition and 2i is published, great synergy from Khoa, Stefan and Zafirah!
Many thanks to Mike Ducat and Alasdair Reid from BioRad/Illumina for the ddSeq platform on which these experiments were conducted

April
Khoa and Caleb’s review on alpha-ketoglutarate dependent enzymes in pluripotency is published in Journal of Biological Chemistry

March
Coral is awarded the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center postdoctoral fellowship

January
Welcome to undergraduate Amulya Suresh ( mentor Zafirah)

2018

October
Coral and our undergraduate team of Edwin, Niki and Simone presented stem cell differentiation to beating heart cells  at the Wisconsin Science Festival 2018. Zafirah participated in a display on precision medicine.

August
Zafirah is awarded the Schlimgen award from the Genetics Department for Outstanding Scholarship in Graduate Studies

Khoa graduates and moves on to a postdoctoral position in Shelley Berger’s lab at University of Pennsylvania

June
Stefan is awarded a spot on the Genome Sciences Training Program

April
Edwin, Niki and Simone present at the Undergraduate Research Symposium

Zafirah is awarded the American Heart Association predoctoral fellowship

Khoa ties for best poster at the 14^th Annual Signal Transduction meeting

March
Zafirah places third in the Bioethics Cartoon Competition

January
Zafirah’s paper on the role of heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) proteins in reprogramming is published in Stem Cell Reports

Stefan Pietrzak from the Cell and Molecular Biology Program joins the lab

2017

September
Coral presents at the Cold Spring Harbor conference on Stem Cell Biology

Collaborative paper with the Lloyd Smith group is published in the Journal for Proteome Research

July
Khoa presents at the Gordon Research Conference on Epigenetics

June
Dan is moving on to a Masters in Biomedical Eng at the Univ. of Illinois, Chicago

May
Cesar and Jaime graduate and will both be taking a gap year before attending Medical School

April
Collaborative paper with the Roy group describing a new computational method C-MINT, for comparing chromatin modification data across cell types is published in Genome Research

February
Zafirah is awarded a one year predoctoral fellowship from the UW- Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center

January
Caleb Dillingham from the Cell and Molecular Pathology program joins the lab

2016

December
Cesar Martinez featured in L&S article about Undergraduate Research Scholars program

August
Amelie Albrecht  from the Univ. of Regensburg, Germany joins the lab for a 3-month internship through the DAAD program (mentor –Coral)

June
Nicole Adrian freshman in Evolutionary Biology joins the lab through the Summer undergraduate research fellowship administered by the Wiscr and SCRMC (mentor –Khoa)

Khoa and Zafirah present posters at the Cell Symposia on Transcriptional Regulation in Development and Disease

May
Michael Diny graduates and moves on to Dental school at Marquette University

April
Cesar and Jaime are both awarded Hilldale undergraduate research fellowships

Cesar presents at the 13th Annual Posters in the Rotunda event at the state Capitol an interaction with state legislators. Cesar is one of only six students (projects) to be selected to represent UW-Madison.

February
Steve and Zach’s paper on the surprisingly non-canoncial reprogramming path taken by Neural Stem cells, where Nanog expressing colonies appear before E-cadherin is published online at Stem Cell Reports 

Rupa receives a Vilas Early Career Investigator Award

January
Coral Wille joins the lab as a postdoctoral scholar

2015

October
Collaborative paper with the Roy group on predicting enhancer promoter interactions is published in Nucleic acids research

September
Dan Devine and Kolin Walker join the lab as associate research specialists

May
Michael Zaiken and Paul graduate. Michael Zaiken will attend graduate school in Developmental Biology at the Univ. of Minnesota

July
Lab receives funding from the NIH

May
Rupa receives Kimmel scholar award from the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Research foundation

June
Jaime Brown sophomore in Biochemistry joins the lab through the Summer undergraduate research fellowship administered by the Wiscr and SCRMC (mentor –Zafirah)

April
Michael Diny is awarded a Hilldale undergraduate research fellowship

March
Khoa receives a best oral presentation award for his talk at the 12th Annual Signal Transduction Research Training Symposium at UW-Madison

Khoa’s paper is chosen as one of the top epigenetic papers of the month by abcam.com 

February
Khoa’s paper on the rewiring of the pluripotency network is online at Nature Communications

January
Cesar Martinez sophomore in Neurobiology and French joins the lab (mentor- Zafirah)

2014

April
Khoa receives a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation

February
Rupa is awarded a Basil O’ Connor starter scholar grant from the March of Dimes foundation

Michael Zaiken junior in Biochemistry (mentor Zach) and Paul Ehrlich junior in Molecular Biology and Neurobiology (mentor Steve) join the lab for undergraduate research

January
Steve is awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the UW-SCRMC

2013

December
Nur Zafirah Zaidan from the Genetics program joins the lab for a Phd

October
Paper identifying acetylation on Serine -10 of histone H3 is published in Epigenetics

September
Khoa wins Gregory F. Daniels Outstanding Poster Presentation Award at the Fall UW- Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine conference

August
Helena Randle, sophomore in Biology (mentored by Steve) and Michael Diny, sophomore in Biology and Spanish (mentored by Khoa) join the lab.

July
Our paper describing the remarkable global change in histone modifications during reprogramming is published in Nature Cell Biology

Zach Olufs joins the lab as an associate research specialist

June
Steve and Rupa publish a review on the reprogramming process in Current Pathobiology reports

Di moves on to graduate school at the Univ. of Mass at Amherst

May
Rupa receives a Shaw Scientist award from the Greater Milwaukee foundation

April
Steve and Rupa publish a preview in Cell Stem Cell on the relationship between the Tet DNA hydroxymethylating enzymes and pluripotency

2012

December
Khoa Tran from the Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology program joins the lab as a PhD student

August
Steven Jackson joins the lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher

May
Di Huang joins the lab as an Assistant Research Specialist