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 signed the paperwork! He is now officially a Shahmorander! 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 highly influenced Shahmorander Youth Achievers (TM). This time, we welcome three new shining beacons on our flat hill: (A) Ishita Vats (left, Plano East High School), shown in her natural habitat of a science museum; (B) Krish Khosla (middle), displayed in his natural habitat at UT Austin; and (C) Romena Alladin (right), who likely did not take this photo in her natural habitat at UT Austin! Welcome to the lab y’all, be on good (enough) behavior, and don’t cure too many diseases. Leave some scraps for us old folk!
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 Dood (right), both of which overlapped with Dr. David in Marc Diamond’s lab in his younger and more vulnerable years. As he is a class act, Marc (Center director) gave an unrivaled sendoff. We envy his oration abilities!
April 24, 2026: Tak ate at the RNA symposium but wasn’t done feeding. He insisted on a second mic drop of the polyserine story at the CMB symposium THE VERY NEXT DAY! Very strong!
April 23, 2026: The Shahmoranders know all, tell most: explains why the ravenous masses demanded TWO selected talks from their horde at 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 Omakase 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 while some fool wore a silly cowboy hat. Sarah engaged in more substantial conversations about alpha synuclein. Peter Douglas joined. 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 autolysophagy. 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. Locals call it the “Big Apple”. How fancy! 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 in the Shahmoranders Lab! He will be leading live cell imaging efforts to understand how aSyn fibrils engage organelles in living cells!
December 19, 2025: And of course, 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. Omakase, clearly. Regina joined, as always.
November 25, 2025: Yogesh Tak officially joins the lab as an joint lab member with Marc Diamond, 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 and DEFINITELY NOT CURSED polyserine project. Noah will soon learn that the project is almost certainly cursed.
October 8, 2025: the embargo has been lifted! We are pleased to announce that one of our dear leaders, Dr. David, has been selected as one of 29-early career investigators in the whole US of A for a New Innovator Award. This honor is bestowed upon those who present highly creative approaches for solving big questions with major public health relevance. David is humbled to accept this incredibly helpful influx of $$$ and….a bit of prestige?
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 4, 2025: Another year, another Center Diwali. Thank you, Tak (not shown) and friends for hosting a fantastic party! Thanks to David for opening the last bottle of wine (shown) with a rock. Truely deserving of a New Innovator Award, methinks?
October 1, 2025: We are thrilled to announce that Burak Okumus has joined the Shahmoranders as a Senior Scientist. Burak is a methods genius and tinkerer, who has spent decades refining the dark arts of microfabrication and single-molecule techniques. He will be working on whatever he feels like, gosh-darn-it! As he should! First step: buy 3D printer.
September 1, 2025: The lab welcomes 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 27, 2025: Several from the lab enjoyed attending the O’Donnell Brain Institute’s copycat event at Celestial brewery. No pictures were taken as CAND “did it first” on July 26. Copycats don’t deserve photographs!
August 18, 2025: The lab welcomes its latest 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 joint research to grad students at “Please Join Our Lab” Day. Several students entertained their occasionally brilliant ramblings. Will such individuals rotate? They will. They will. But, stay tuned!
August 11, 2025: A Sasquatch invades the thesis celebration of good friend of the lab, Peter Kunach. Congratulations Peter on your thesis! And your samsquanch discovery…
August 8, 2025: The lab celebrated both Jenny and Sarah’s birthdays the best way they knew how: By stabbing (non-living) things!
July 29, 2025: Within moments of discovering John’s re-furbished mass spectrometer, David effortlessly masters it. With the help of shooting range hearing protection, clearly. Keep those ears safe kids from the….ionized peptides.