Lab News
June 20, 2026: Thank you to UT Southwestern’s Press Office for the kind promotional video (link below; in recognition of David’s 2025 President’s Research Council Award)!
Timestamp=1m50s: https://vimeo.com/1202204152/26a5cd3643
June 8, 2026: Alvin now officially a member of the lab! Sarah and David are thrilled to mentor him on his membrane-centric PhD explorations of unknown scientific frontiers! Toward these efforts, Alvin will be re-igniting our efforts to tackle the TMEM106B problem.
June 1, 2026: Another summer, another batch of Youth Achievers! This time, we welcome three new rising starts to the lab: Ishita Vats (left, Plano East High School), Krish Khosla (middle, UT Austin), and Romena Alladin (right, UT Austin)! Welcome to the lab y’all, be on good (enough) behavior, and don’t cure too many diseases.
May 22, 2026: Haoxing passed his qualifying exam! But not without a basketball-related injury (shown here, carb-maxing for the final stretch). Congratulations Haoxing! Sarah and David are very proud of your hard work!
April 30, 2026: It was sad to say goodbye to both Sherry Clark (left) and Dana Dodd (right), both of which overlapped with David in Marc Diamond’s lab when he was a grad student. As he is a class act, Marc (Center director) gave an unrivaled sendoff. We envy his oration abilities!
April 24, 2026: After the RNA symposium, Tak insisted on a second mic drop of the polyserine story at the CMB symposium the very next day! Strong!
April 23, 2026: The masses demanded TWO selected talks from the lab for the annual UT Southwestern RNA Symposium. Both talks were very well received: awesome job, Tak and Shefali!
April 17, 2026: Thank you to Mike Henne for hosting Cell Editor extraordinaire, Antonia de Maio, for a visit to UT Southwestern, and for being magnanimous enough to invite Sarah and David (AND geranyl-geranylation enthusiast and friend of the lab, Pete Douglas) for a fine dinner at the seafood place that blocks traffic at David’s orthodontist.
April 15, 2026: Another hosted speaker, another Uchi experience, this time with Vik Khurana. David and Vik bonded over their shared experiences in Alice Springs, Australia, one of which was lived, the other of which was gleaned from Wikipedia. Sarah engaged in more substantial scientific conversations about alpha synuclein. Peter Douglas joined, so there was certainly discussion about geranyl-geranylation. Because, it is all.
March 5, 2026: Lab achievement unlocked! Yogesh Tak receives our first trainee-initiated funding for his work on polyanionic cofactors in tau fibril toxicity. It’s a Sprouts grant, so we expect the greenest shoots possible to burst forth from the polyserine-seeded ground!
March 4, 2026: We are pleased to host a record FOURTH rotation student: Tao Liu. Tao will be working with Grisha on understanding why certain fibrils are targeted by the ubiquitin-proteasome system, whereas others are triaged for autophagy. Welcome to the lab, Tao!
January 27, 2026: We were sad to say goodbye to great friend of the lab, Sushobhna Batra, a fantastic PhD student with Marc Diamond. She will be moving to the Dallas of the Northeast, New York City. We wish her the very best at new postdoc home, Rockefeller, an amazing place to do impactful science!
January 5, 2026: We are excited to host Alvin Wang for a rotation! He will be leading live cell imaging efforts to understand how aSyn fibrils engage organelles in living cells!
December 19, 2025: The year ends with the CAND official holiday party, this time at Community Taproom. For the second consecutive year, David failed to take pictures. Sarah probably did but David is very tired of catching up on editing the site. He needs to write a paper.
December 17, 2025: Sarah and David greatly enjoyed hosting Aaron Gitler (Stanford), who gave an excellent talk on his latest TMEM106B findings! A fantastic dinner was had at Uchi. Thank you to Regina for joining us!
November 25, 2025: Yogesh Tak officially joins the lab, having spent two years polishing his biochemistry chops in Diamond’s lab. He has been assigned the unenviable task of breaking the wretched polyserine curse that has taken down so many of us mere mortals. If anyone can break the curse, it’s Tak!
October 20, 2025: We are excited to welcome Noah Haggerty to the lab as its second rotation student of the year! Noah will be working with Tak on the very exciting polyserine project.
October 8, 2025: the embargo has been lifted! We are pleased to announce that one of our dear leaders (David) has been selected as one of 29-early career investigators in the USA for a New Innovator Award. This honor is bestowed upon those who propose highly creative approaches for solving big questions with major public health relevance. David is humbled to accept this incredibly helpful funding and recognition.
Thank you to UT Southwestern for the amazing press coverage: https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/newsroom/articles/year-2025/oct-nih-directors-new-innovator-award.html
David specifically thanks the NIH’s civil servants for their hard work during a stressful funding cycle. He also thanks the leadership (and chair, Marc Diamond) at UTSW for betting on the lab’s high risk, high reward research, and of course, the even-greater innovator, Sarah Shahmoradian, who co-leads the lab!
More info on this excellent funding mechanism: https://www.nih.gov/common-fund/common-fund-programs/high-risk-high-reward-research-hrhr/nih-directors-new-innovator-award
October 1, 2025: David and Sarah are thrilled to announce their third joint lab member, Burak Okumus (Senior Scientist). Burak is a methods genius and tinkerer, who has spent decades refining microfabrication and single-molecule techniques. He will be working on whatever he gets excited about tomorrow!
September 1, 2025: The labs welcome Weiren Wang as a Fall rotation student! Weiren will be working with Shefali on a pilot project regarding the organization of titin mRNPs in cultured skeletal muscle!
August 18, 2025: Sarah and David welcome their second joint lab member, Emma Choo, who is joining the group as a Data Scientist! She will be crunching some tomograms with the help of artificial intelligence! Emma is a fantastic scientist—we are lucky to have her join the group!
August 13, 2025: Sarah and David present their collaborative research to grad students at “Please Join Our Lab” Day. Several students entertained their occasionally brilliant ramblings. Will such individuals rotate? Stay tuned!
August 8, 2025: The lab celebrated both Jenny and Sarah’s birthdays the best way they knew how: By stabbing cakes!
July 29, 2025: Within moments of discovering John’s re-furbished mass spectrometer, David effortlessly masters it.