Graduate student Tara Yankee was selected as an inaugural recipient of a James Taylor Foundation  scholarship. She was one of 10 students sponsored to attend the 2021 CSHL Genome Informatics meeting where she presented her work on human craniofacial gene expression dynamics.

Kevin Child, PhD and Andrea Wilderman, both from the lab of Dr. Justin Cotney, were selected as finalists for the 2021 Charles J. Epstein Trainee Awards for Excellence in Human Genetics Research for the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), to be held virtually October 18-22. Dr. Child and Ms. Wilderman were selected from over 500 applicants and have been invited to give presentations on their work during the ASHG virtual meeting. Dr. Child’s research focuses on the role of alternative splicing in heart development. He will discuss his current work using Nanopore long-read sequencing to confirm the presence of novel splice variants in the human embryonic heart. Ms. Wilderman’s research centers on the use of multiple sequencing-based technologies to identify tissue-specific regulatory regions and the genes they target. Her presentation will summarize her PhD thesis research using mice to characterize a novel craniofacial superenhancer region which regulates the expression of HoxA genes and affects palate development. Finalists for the award receive complimentary registration for the conference as well as $1000. Six awardees will receive an additional $1000 and will be announced at the ASHG Meeting in October.

Congratulations Kevin and Andrea!

Congratulations to Nagham who was recently awarded an F31 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship! She will study the role of Foxp transcription factors in cerebellar development and be jointly advised by Drs. James Li and Justin Cotney.

Congratulations to Emma on her newly awarded F30 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for DMD/PhD students. Emma will be investigating the role of the noncoding genome in risk for developing caries and other oral diseases.

The Cotney lab, lead by Dr. Jennifer VanOudenhove and graduate student Tara Yankee, published a paper in Circulation Research describing chromatin and gene expression dynamics during human heart organogenesis. Check out our data on our website, our track hub on the UCSC Genome Browser, and read the paper at Circulation Research. Congrats all!