Lab News
July 26, 2025: Thank you to Celestial Beerworks for brewing a tau-inspired IPA to raise awareness and $$$ for Alzheimer’s research at UT Southwestern. Fellow CAND PI, Lukasz Joachimiak, gets credit for the idea and execution. Hopefully, all in the Dallas area will help us drink our way to a cure! Your liver might not thank you, but our Center will! Livers are overrated if the taxpayer invests in NIH liver cures!
July 25, 2025: The Labs celebrated the hard work of our Youth Achievers by ending our week at UTSW’s local watering hole, Maple Landing. Beer and mocktails were consumed. Pizza was had. David and Sarah learned way too much about “kids these days” and their Socially Tiktak’ed Internets. Always great to host ambitious and curious local students in the lab! And learn a bit about how old we are!
July 25, 2025: Congratulations, Sydnie, for presenting an excellent poster at the Rising Stars Research Symposium! Sydnie shared her summer research on how optogenetic TDP assemblies inefficiently seed TDP fibril formation in cells. A very important contribution to the lab’s first manuscript, which we hope to share soon! Sydnie now leaves to South Dakota for commendable community outreach/service, but we hope she returns to continue her research in the near future!
July 19, 2025: Friends celebrated David’s very big, but embargoed, funding news at Toulouse! Sure, his friends were primarily there for the free drinks…and to give David a hard time about turning 40! Sad!
Oh….and the lab celebrated David’s very big, but embargoed, funding news at Jose over lunch. More to be shared shortly?
July 7, 2025: We are thrilled to announce that former rotation student, Haoxing Liang, has joined the lab as a PhD-seeking graduate student. Haoxing is currently setting up the lab’s first unbiased CRISPR screens!
July 4, 2025: Happy America Day from Grisha and all of us in the Shahmoranders group! No fingers were lost—at least on the highly prized pipetting hands of lab members. Fine, David did not check on their “useless” hands. Only need one hand to science! NOTE: with this “advertisement”, the Lab now meets the State Department’s new J1 requirements for employing Russian citizens.
July 2, 2025: After a humiliating loss to Victor, Grisha decided that his only hope to rehabilitate his reputation was to….wrestle a child. Heck of a job there, Grisha!
June 30, 2025: Another week, another Shahmorander Youth Achiever unlocked! Welcome Jenny Chu to the lab! She joins us from the most competitive all-girls high school academy in the DFW area. Yeah, that’s right, talking about THE Hockaday School, yo! Jenny will be maximizing the potential of our labs’ computational image analysis pipelines. Her hobbies include writing poetry and outsmarting mean girls! We hate mean girls in the Shahmorander Group!
June 23, 2025: Another Youth Achiever crashed his way thru the UT Southwestern Summer Camp gauntlet to the Shahmoranders group: Ajay Kota, who joins us from beautiful Centennial High in the picturesque suburb of Frisco, TX! Ajay will be working with Victor and Olive on solving cryo-EM structures of cell-extracted tau and TDP-43 fibrils. He will also be defeating Grisha in bi-weekly arm wrestling beat-downs. His WWF idols include THE HULK HOGAN and Earthquake.
June 9, 2025: We are delighted that undergraduate extraordinaire, Harper Averitt (left), has returned to the lab from her Baptist studies sabbatical. And we are excited to host UTSW Rising STAR and Youth Achiever, Sydnie Metrano (right). Harper will once again be coordinating with Rupam on our tau-polyserine epic; Sydnie, with Shefali on completing the lab’s first TDP story.
May 15, 2025: We were sad to say goodbye to Sarah’s outstanding senior scientist, Tri Tran, who had been leading CLEM efforts in the Lab. We wish him the best of luck on the next stage of his scientific career! He may return one day for a classic Shahmorander twist!
May 13, 2025: Thank you to the President’s Research Council at UT Southwestern for funding our research on neuromuscular diseases! It was a pleasure for David to meet so many enthusiastic local backers of UTSW’s research mission….and was certainly humbling to receive so much attention—nice action shot of David with our favorite Dean, Andy Lee! And Marc, sure, sure. Marc’s okay too.
May 5, 2025: We welcome Haoxing Liang as a rotation student. He will be working with Grisha to cure the TDP…with cats, I assume?
April 8, 2025: It was an honor to meet a hero of the Lab, Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, and learn about her latest stunning research on axonal transport. Thank you to Sarah for hosting and for providing an amazing opportunity to learn from one of the great! JLS is a true science rock God! David thanks her specifically for the encouraging words on how to mend fences with his idol who will not be named.
April 4, 2025: The Shamoranders celebrated David’s first “notice of award” at Social Pie—apparently, we invaded a private gathering but whatever! We are funded, ya jabronis, so back off! We are beyond grateful for three-years of funding from the Welch Foundation to support our efforts to understand how polyserine phosphorylation regulates RNA homeostasis.
March 27, 2025: First rule of Shahmorander Lab Fight Club. Talk about Shahmorander Lab Fight Club. Grisha vs. Victor. Grisha lost…clearly.
March 26, 2025: We were delighted to host friend of the Lab, Steven Boeynaems, from Baylor College of Medicine! He gave an excellent talk on how cationic peptides may trigger innate immunity signaling in neurodegenerative diseases! Always a delight to talk crazy ideas with Steven over a drink or two (or more)…with OMAKASE (!!!), clearly :)
February 1, 2025: We joined Sarah Shahmoradian’s lab at Community to say goodbye to Valerie Perez, a postdoc with whom David has collaborated over the past 5-years. We wish her the best of luck in her new position at Thermo, where she will be freezing and milling anything they will allow her to!
January 28, 2025: Congratulations to Shefali for winning a one-year membership to the RNA Society! Thank you to UT Southwestern’s RNA Club for the generous support!
January 27, 2025: The lab, or David at least, is back on Science Twitter! But it seems to have a new name. Because some jerk ruined old Science Twitter. Good news: nothing has changed. Bad news: nothing has changed. https://bsky.app/profile/davidwsanders.bsky.social
January 17, 2025: A major lab pivot occurred. The history books will remember this day. Forever. EDIT: yeah, trying the joint lab thing. Don’t tell our tenure committees?
January 2, 2025: New year, new lab space! We are pleased to move….thirty feet….into slightly larger digs. We are more excited to announce that we now share lab space with our close collaborator, Dr. Sarah Shahmoradian! Can anything not be cryo-milled? Stay tuned. David has ideas.