Daniel Schaffer, a senior in the Computational Biology Undergraduate program, has been selected for early initiation into the prestigious academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. Schaffer is one of only 21 seniors selected for early initiation. Phi Beta Kappa was founded in 1776 and is the nation’s oldest and most distinguished undergraduate academic honor society. With chapters …
By Kirsten Heuring Media Inquiries: Please contact Jocelyn Duffy, Associate Dean for Communications, MCS (jhduffy@andrew.cmu.edu / 412-268-9982) Ruby Redlich’s interest in genetics and sleeping patterns first awakened when she took an introductory computational biology class with Andreas Pfenning, assistant professor of computational biology. “He had talked about some projects his lab was working on, and it seemed …
By Aaron Aupperlee with UPMC A collaborative group of neuroscientists from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine received a $6.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to create an ultra-high-resolution molecular atlas of the brain and develop brain cell type-specific strategies …
By Aaron Aupperlee (aaupperlee@cmu.edu) Daniel Schaffer sees endless possibilities in the genomes of living organisms. The junior in Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Biology Department is identifying regulatory elements in a genome that help determine a species’ brain size relative to its body. He is part of a team looking at more than 100,000 candidates across …
Daniel Schaffer has recently received an honorable mention from the Computer Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in the area of computing research. In the past, Daniel researched the relationship between genotype and phenotype at the National Institutes …
By Aaron Aupperlee Media Inquiries: aaupperlee@cmu.edu / 412-268-9068 Nearly $1 million in recent funding from the National Science Foundation will allow Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science faculty members Fei Fang and Andreas Pfenning to dig deeper into their fields of study. Fang, the Leonardo Assistant Professor in the Institute for Software Research, and Pfenning, an assistant professor …
The Pfenning laboratory for neurogenomics was awarded an NSF Career award: Machine Learning Approaches to Understanding Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Convergent Evolution of Vocal Learning Behavior. The ability to perform a variety of complex behaviors, like human speech, is encoded in the billions of nucleotides that make up the genome of an organism. Although speech itself is …
Substance use disorders (SUD) affect more than 100 million people worldwide and are influenced by the genetic makeup of the individual. With this fellowship grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, BaDoi will investigate how genetic differences in humans could influence sets of brain cell types shared across human, monkey, and rodents by conducting …
Andreas will present the lab’s latest work on Alzheimer’s at the Project Olympus Show & Tell event April 20th. Show & Tell is an annual series during Spring Carnival to highlight the work of students and faculty across CMU, and connect them to the wider entrepreneurial community. Andreas’s talk will focus on “Translating genetic findings into new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.”
This Sunday, Andreas will be interviewed along with the author of a new book on a family with a strongly inherited form of AD. The segment will air on 3/12 at 11:30AM EST on the local CBS affiliate (KDKA). The interview will be part of KDPG Sunday Edition, a report which “features updates on current events …
We’re happy to announce the lab will join nine other labs in the Collaboration to Infer Regulatory Circuits and to Uncover Innovative Therapeutic Strategies (CIRCUITS), a new initiative to translate genetic findings into therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. We’ll be combining computational and experimental techniques to study how genetic variation in enhancer regions influences Alzheimer’s disease predisposition. …
Andreas was one of nine recipients of an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in Computer Science. He accepted the award at a ceremony in San Francisco.
This week, Morgan Wirthlin officially joins the lab. She starts as a postdoc and BrainHub fellow, hailing from Portland, OR. For more insight, check out her interview on the CBD facebook page.
The first shipments are in, and first experiments under way. While there is more set-up to be done, the wet lab is coming together. All is on track to welcome Morgan next month.
Today, a friend and collaborator of the Neurogenomics laboratory, Christin Glorioso, published an article in eLIFE about the state of science funding and academia as whole. She and her coauthors argue that the decrease in federal grant funding coupled with an increase in average age of grant recipients is pushing some of the best minds away from …
With the semester wrapping up, the undergraduate students in the lab presented their research projects. They have been doing innovative work on a range of topics, from the evolution of regulatory regions to mechanisms of aging/Alzheimer’s disease. Congrats to them on a great semester!
Lab manager, Ashley Brown, and research assistant, John Apostolides, are hitting the ground running after starting this spring. Currently, they are starting first experiments while continuing to set up the laboratory space in Mellon and maintain the website. Ashley, the virus guru, is bringing her extensive training in molecular biology to get the lab up …
“Each cell in your body has the same DNA, but they don’t all follow the same instructions. Some become blood cells; others become brain cells or muscle tissue. But if the DNA has a mistake or the cells turn on the wrong set of genes, that can lead to disease. So how do cells decide …
“Our results show that functional conservation between human and mouse is not restricted to protein-coding genes,” says Andreas Pfenning, joint first author of the study and a postdoc at MIT. “This opens up the use of epigenomics methods in model organisms to study an inaccessible organ like the brain, and how it changes in response …
“‘By studying the epigenomes of cells, we come to learn about how they became what they are,’ says Christopher Glass, a genomics scientist at UC San Diego who was not involved in the work. And unlike a person’s genome sequence, the epigenome can readily change in response to diet, disease, and environment factors, allowing cells—and …
Neurogenomics Laboratory