2018 Events
- November 3–7: Nicole, Xin, Helena and Tao attended the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) Annual meeting in San Diego. Nicole and Xin did poster presentation, and Helena gave a talk at a nanosymposium that was chaired by Tao.
- October 27: The Ma lab participated in the Alzheimer's Association Walk to End Alzheimer's at Winston-Salem. Good job, everyone!
September 22: Tao attended the first North Carolina State Go Championship Tournament in Raleigh and won first place in Division B.- September 19, Tao was awarded Wake Forest School of Medicine Early Career in Basic Science Investigator Award.
- Hannah Jester, Saahj Gosrani, and Adline Metayer joined the lab as master students. Welcome!
- September 6–8: As an invited speaker, Tao presented “Impaired mRNA translational capacity is correlated with aging-dependent memory deficits and behavioral inflexibility” at the International Neuroscience and Psychiatry Summit in Tai’an, China.
- The paper "Genetic Removal of eIF2α Kinase PERK in Mice Enables Hippocampal L-LTP Independent of mTORC1 Activity" was officially published in the Journal of Neurochemistry and selected as a cover article with editorial highlight! Congratulations to all, particularly Helena and Wenzhong, who are the co-first authors.
- July 22-26: Helena and Tao attended the Alzheimer's Association International Conference at Chicago. Helena presented a poster entitled "Brain-specific repression of AMPKα1 alleviates memory deficits and synaptic failure in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease".
- July 9: Dr. Qian Yang joined the lab as a research fellow. Qian got her PhD from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China, and she is an expert in electrophysiology. Welcome, Qian!
- June: Tao has been invited to serve as a member for the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Neurodegeneration (CMND) study section of NIH.
- April 16: Brenna successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled "The Role of Translation Elongation Deficits in Alzheimer's Disease Pathogenesis." Congratulations, Dr. Beckelman!
- April 23: Xin successfully defended his master's thesis entitled "AMPKalpha Signaling Dysregulation in AD Monkey Model and Human AD Patients." Congratulations, Xin!
- Brenna has been selected as the recipient of the Wake Forest Gordor A. Melson Outstanding Doctoral Student Award for 2018. Congratulations, Brenna!