Lab News

The lab warmly congratulates former Ph.D. trainee Zak Baker and Dr. Rachel Guerra on their recent nuptial. Super happy for the both of you!

Lab preprint alert!! Awesome collaboration spearheaded by the Pioli lab looking at how loss of cytochrome c oxidase activity in hepatocytes affects the development of various immune cell lineages in other, peripheral tissues.

Fifteen years after signing on the dotted line Scot is promoted to Full Professor.

Sampurna attends the Mitochondria & Chloroplasts meeting in Spain where she is awarded best poster presentation. Way to go Sampurna!!

After 3 fruitful years, we bid Dr. Tetiana Katrii goodbye and wish her well as she transitions to staff scientist in ADRL at the U of S. Can’t wait for her main work to be published so we can share it with all of you!

The lab is grateful to the INMD for bridge funding our CIHR project grant application! This financial injection will be essential to our mechanistic pursuit of how mitochondrial dysfunction leads to immune suppression in mouse models of human disease.

Congratulations to Nikki, who successfully defended her M.Sc. thesis!

The magnum opus of former PDF Dr. Kimberly Jett is accepted for publication at JCI! It took a lot of collaborative might to pull this off. Congrats to all. Looking forward to the next chapter of related experiments and beginning to study clinically relevant patient cohorts.

Another year of teaching 310 is almost in the books, and I just want to recognize the incredible engagement of this year’s cohort of students – it made the brief time we shared in the classroom a ton of fun!

Happy to see a duo of papers originating from Dr. Jim Xiang’s lab that we were fortunate enough to contribute to be published in the Journal of Immunology and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Congrats to all!

Work with Dr. Mary Cheng’s group (UTM) is out in Cell Reports! A tremendously fun and intellectually rich collaboration describing how ablation of a histone variant affects neuronal survival and leads to an ataxia, phenotypes that are tied to profound changes in mitochondrial function.

The lab deposits its first BioRvix preprint describing seven years of work that led to the discovery that α-fetoprotein is secreted into the circulation in response to mitochondrial dysfunction where it then suppresses the immune system. Cool follow-up studies using samples from mitochondrial disease patients are on-going! Congrats to Kim for driving this beautiful work..

Aren accepts a position as a Research Officer in the Next-Generation Sequencing Facility here in the College of Medicine. Oh how 10 years together flew by! It was a privilege to watch you grow as a person and a scientist during that time.

The lab bids farewell to Dr. Kimberly Jett. Kim was with us for almost 6 years and her expertise and intellect will be sorely missed.

The lab receives word that after a 3 month lockdown, we can now operate at 25% capacity. Now if only Faculty could return to their offices! Nonetheless we are relieved by and grateful for this news.

Scot heads to UC Berkeley to visit with Chris Chang and his group. The bonus was Paul Cobine (Auburn) and Martina Ralle (OHSU) were also present, making for stimulating scientific discussion, stupendous meals and company. It also gave me the opportunity to give Martina a high five for our recently accepted Review article that will be published in April.

Scot wraps up his annual portion of teaching BIOC310. The class was exceptionally small this year but student engagement was also unusually high which made it a lot of fun to be in that room three days a week! The acceptance of a collaborative paper with the Vishal (TAMU) and Vila (IBR) groups in Cell Reports only made the month that much better.

We welcome Nikki Forsberg to the lab. Congrats on your NSERC CGS-M award and your Saskatchewan Innovation top up. What a start to your graduate studies program!

Scot travels to SickKids for the Can-GARD SAB and a minisymposium on innovative strategies to treat a suite of rare diseases. A short but inspiring visit!

Scot travels to College Station, TX to give a talk in the Department of Biochemistry at TAMU and gets back just in time to have dinner with this year’s Spinks lecturer and friend Dr. Chris Chang.

The lab receives bridge funding from the College of Medicine that will allow us to continue our exciting studies on cell non-autonomous regulation of adaptive immune system function. Many thanks to the OVDR!

Dr. Tetiana Katrii (co-supervised with Freywald) joins the lab as a SHRF PDF, and Ms. Sampurna Ghosh passes her Ph.D. qualifying exam with flying colours. Welcome and way to go, in that order!

Scot and Kim head to Sorrento for the 11th International Copper Meeting. Kim rocks her oral presentation and receives the best trainee talk award. Very happy for Kim whose research findings are quite exciting. More to come on that front soon!

We are excited to welcome Daniel Mbaka to the lab for his fourth year Honours research project.