Lab News
December 19, 2025: The year ends with the CAND official holiday party 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. Thanks 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 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, which we hope is nearing completion.
October 8, 2025: the embargo has been lifted! We are pleased to announce that one of our lab leaders (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 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 his 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 is a Senior Scientist and method development genius , 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 lab welcomes Weiren Wang as a Fall rotation student! Weiren will be working with Shefali on a pilot project to study the organization of titan 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 presented their joint lab’s research to graduate 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.
July 26, 2025: Thank you to Celestial Beerworks for brewing a tau-inspired IPA to raise awareness and funding for Alzheimer’s research at UT Southwestern. Fellow CAND PI, Lukasz Joachimiak, gets credit for the idea and execution.
July 25, 2025: The Labs celebrated the hard work of our Youth Achievers by ending the week at Maple Landing. David and Sarah always enjoy hosting ambitious and curious local students in the lab!
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-43 assemblies do not seed TDP-43 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 25, 2025: 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 Sanders and Shahmoradian Sanders Labs as its first co-advised graduate student. Haoxing is currently setting up the lab’s first unbiased CRISPR screens, which he hopes will reveal mechanisms of TDP-43 fibril propagation!
July 4, 2025: Happy Fourth of July from all of us in the lab! No lab members’ fingers were lost, so pipetting can continue!
June 30, 2025: Another week, another Youth Achiever joins the team! Welcome Jenny Chu to the lab: she joins us from the most competitive all-girls high school academy in the DFW area. That’s right, talking about THE Hockaday School! Jenny will be maximizing the potential of our labs’ computational image analysis pipelines. Her hobbies include writing poetry and outsmarting mean girls!
June 23, 2025: Another Youth Achiever crashed his way thru the UT Southwestern Summer Camp onboarding gauntlet to the 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.
June 9, 2025: We are delighted that undergraduate extraordinaire, Harper Averitt (left), has returned to the lab for a second summer. We are also 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 Labs. We wish him the best of luck on the next stage of his scientific career!
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 Dean, Andy Lee and department leader, Marc Diamond.
May 5, 2025: We welcome Haoxing Liang as a rotation student in the Sanders and Shahmoradian Labs.. He will be working with Grisha to cure the TDP-43!
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 scienctific rock star!
April 4, 2025: The Sanders and Shahmoradian Labs celebrated David’s first “notice of award” at Social Pie. 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 Lab Fight Club. Talk about 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 trigger innate immunity signaling in neurodegenerative diseases! Always a delight to catch-up with Steven!
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.
January 2, 2025: New year, new lab space! We are pleased to move….thirty feet….into slightly larger space 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.