News for Home Page

TPCB presented the 18th Annual Tri-Institutional Chemical Biology Symposium on September 8, 2022. The event was held on the campus of Rockefeller University, with over 170 registrants attending in person and remotely. The day featured four faculty keynote lectures, three student talks, and 45 poster presentations. [more]

Our Diversity is Our Strength. TPCB has a long-standing commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion at all levels in science. Our outstanding students come from many different backgrounds and the program has zero tolerance for racism or discrimination in any form. We have taken numerous recent efforts to promote these principles. [more].

The Tri-I Chemical Biology Summer Program (ChBSP) welcomed six outstanding undergraduates on campus again this summer! The students pursued forefront chemical biology research in TPCB labs, participated in professional development activities, and presented posters on their work at the end of the summer. [more]

The annual New York Academy of Sciences Chemical Biology Symposium was held on May 26, 2022 in partnership with TPCB. This flagship event for scientists across five states featured keynote lectures by Dr. Ayesha Sitlani (IAVI) and Prof. Peter Schultz (Scripps) as well as talks and posters by students, including TPCB’s Lauren Vostal! [more]

TPCB congratulates Prof. Olga Boudker at Weill Cornell on her election to the National Academy of Sciences. Academy membership is considered one of the highest honors in science and recognizes Prof. Boudker’s distinguished achievements in studying transport of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. [more]

A team of TPCB researchers has discovered that linker histone H1 may play a role in protecting the genome from damage during replication. The work published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology was led by Rachel Leicher, Wola Osunsade, and Gabriella Chua in the labs of Prof. Yael David and Prof. Shixin Liu. [more]

TPCB student J. Peter Lee and colleagues in the labs of TPCB faculty members Prof. David Scheinberg and Prof. Derek Tan have developed a novel class of CAR-T cells that home to tumors where they activate small-molecule anticancer drugs in situ. These “SEAKER” cells were reported in a recent paper in Nature Chemical Biology. [more]

In a recent Nature paper, TPCB student Emily Rundlet and faculty member Prof. Scott Blanchard have used a combination of small-molecule antibiotics, single-molecule FRET imaging, and cryo-EM studies to gain fundamental new insights into the dynamic process of translocation in the ribosome during protein synthesis. [more]

Congratulations to Prof. Vanessa Ruta, who has been appointed as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute! Prof. Ruta’s lab at Rockefeller studies the molecular and neural mechanisms of olfaction in Drosophila melanogaster. She joins six other current HHMI Investigators on the TPCB faculty who hold this prestigious appointment.[more]

TPCB students have opportunities to work with outstanding faculty at the forefront of chemical biology. Congratulations to TPCB faculty members Seth Darst, Daniel Heller, Kayvan Keshari, Viviana Risca, David Scheinberg, and Ekaterina Vinogradova, who have been recognized recently with prestigious awards and grants. [more]

TPCB student Nicholas Prescott has been awarded a prestigious NCI F99/K00 fellowship! This award will support both his graduate training with Prof. Yael David at MSK, as well as up to 4 years of postdoctoral training. Nick’s research focuses on understanding how DNA viruses interact with chromatin factors in human host cells. [more]

TPCB is excited to welcome three new faculty, Prof. Melinda Diver at MSK, Prof. Jacob Geri at Weill Cornell, and Prof. Jeremy Rock at Rockefeller. Their labs bringing exciting new research opportunities across the spectrum of chemical biology, in the areas of pain sensation, protein target identification, and host–pathogen interactions. [more]

TPCB faculty member Prof. Katya Vinogradova has been named to the Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12! This list recognizes talented young scientists who are taking risks in the early stages of their careers. Prof. Vinogradova’s research uses chemical proteomics to investigate the immune system. [more]

TPCB congratulates our 2021 graduates! This exceptional group successfully completed their PhD training in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. They presented their thesis defenses online, surrounded virtually by colleagues, friends, and family. We wish them all the best as they continue onto the next stages of their careers! [more]

Congratulations to Prof. Luciano Marraffini, who has been elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences! Election to the Academy is one of the most significant honors one can receive and recognizes Prof. Marraffini’s seminal research on the CRISPR-Cas system that is used in gene editing. [more]

Alumni Profile: TPCB alumni Dr. Renato Bauer and Dr. Jacqueline Wurst discuss the flexibility of the graduate program, the unique opportunities in the Tri-Institutional research environment, and how their training in chemistry prepared them for their current careers in the pharmaceutical industry at Eli Lilly. [more]

Student Profile: TPCB student Chaya Stern describes her non-traditional path to graduate school, where she is now working in Prof. John Chodera’s computational chemistry lab at Sloan Kettering as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She also discusses the support she has received from TPCB as a parent. [more]

Alumni Profile: TPCB alumna Prof. Niroshika Keppetipola discusses her training experience with mentor Prof. Stewart Shuman and how it prepared her for an independent academic career. Now a faculty member at Cal State Fullerton, her lab studies post-translational regulation of RNA binding proteins in alternative splicing. [more]

Faculty Profile: TPCB faculty member Prof. Yael David is a new faculty member at Sloan Kettering. She describe her lab’s approach using protein engineering to study epigenetic regulation and its correlation with disease states. She also discusses her approach to mentoring and her experiences as a woman in science. [more]

Alumni Profile: TPCB alumna Dr. Amy Grunbeck Perea developed photoactivatable probes to study G protein-coupled receptors with Prof. Tom Sakmar. After graduating with 9 papers on her CV, she did a postdoc fellowship at Genzyme, then joined Abcam, a biotech company in Cambridge, developing new tools for protein analysis. [more]

Faculty Profile: TPCB faculty member Prof. Jue Chen is an HHMI Investigator who studies the structure and function of molecular pumps called ABC transporters that are involved in many important biological processes. She discusses the recent cryo-EM ‘resolution revolution’ and her personalized approach to mentoring her students. [more]