Congratulations Shelby!

Congratulations to Shelby Doyle for winning the first annual Peter Karches Mentorship Prize.

This prize, newly established in memory of the late Peter Karches, is awarded to up to four postdocs or graduate students in recognition of the important role trainees play in the mentorship of high school and undergraduate students working in KI laboratories.

Congratulations, Shelby!

Karches Prize winners (left to right): Peter Westcott, Kim Nguyen, Shelby Doyle, Amanda Whipple. Photo taken from the Koch Institute news page.

Congratulations to Brice!

Dr. Brice Curtin has been named as a Convergence Scholar through the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine Convergence Scholars Program.

“The Convergence Scholars Program (CSP) provides postdoctoral trainees opportunities to further their experiences and skills beyond the research laboratory. Scholars will learn more about science project development by approaching it from various angles, including policy and regulations, technology transfer, education and outreach, business and finances, industry, and the clinic.”

Congrats, Brice!

2019 CSP Class (left to right): Brice Curtin (Koehler Lab), Leslie Chan (Bhatia Lab), Sean Smith (Hammond Lab), Padmini Pillai (Langer Lab), Neelkanth Bardhan (Belcher Lab), Sharanya Sivanand (Vander Heiden Lab, front row), Pau Creixell (Yaffe Lab, back row), Piotr Kowalski (Anderson Lab), and Hannah Watkins (Irvine Lab). Photo taken from CPCM webpage.

Congratulations to Nick, Rob and Shelby!

Congratulations are overdue, but well deserved for Dr. Nick Struntz, who was one of four post doctoral researchers to be awarded the MIT-GSK Gertrude B. Elion Research Fellowship. This new fellowship program in honor of the trailblazing Nobel laureate, Gertrude B. Elion, is awarded to select post doctoral associates focused on drug discovery and development who are pursuing fund research that has the potential to transform and modernize drug discovery. Congrats, Nick! 

Photo of the awardees (Nick is second from the left) included with the MIT News press release

Additional congratulations to Rob Wilson, who received the Fall 2017 Wishnok Prize for the Bioengineering and Toxicology Seminar (BATS), and to Shelby Doyle, who received Honorable Mention for Spring 2018 prize. Fantastic to see such great representation of the group by all of our graduate students in this important seminar series.

Welcome Rob; Congrats Andrew!

January 2016

The lab welcomes Rob Wilson, a graduate student in Biological Engineering at MIT.  Rob joins us from Purdue University, where he studied biochemistry and worked on developing peptide probes for tyrosine kinase activity. He will be working on novel approaches to attenuate oncogenic Ras signaling, and is also interested in chemical modulation of protein stability.

Congratulations to  Andrew Chen, who recently won the Wishnok Prize for the Bioengineering and Toxicology Seminar (BATS)!The prize is awarded for the best talks in the Fall and Spring semesters, and is given in honor of Pete Wishnok, who led BATS for decades.  Congratulations, Andrew!!

Group wins Deshpande grant for translation efforts

Archive from October 2015

Congratulations to  Dr. Koehler, Francisco Caballero, and Eric Stefan, who were awarded a grant from MIT's Deshpande Center for Technical Innovation for their work on the c-Myc oncoprotein!  The Deshpande Center awards grants which fund proof-of-concept studies, and validation for emerging technologies.  The team has identified small molecules that bind to c-Myc containing complexes, and a smaller subset that modulate c-Myc function in cells, including c-Myc mediated transcription.  The project will explore the therapeutic potential of these small molecule binders.

Welcome Andrew, Rohit, and the Vegas twins!

Archive from January 2014

The Koehler lab welcomed several new members at the start of the year, including two new students and a couple of babies.

Andrew Chen, a graduate student in the Department of Biological Engineering, joins us from Cornell University’s undergraduate program in Biological Engineering. Andrew will be working on novel approaches to targeting Myc-associated transcriptional complexes. Prior to MIT, Andrew spent time as a Research Scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Rohit Thummalapali, an MD student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, comes to us from Yale University where his studies focused on Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Rohit has joined a collaborative project involving the Bernstein and Suva labs at MGH aimed at developing probes for a core transcription factor network and chromatin-modifying enzymes involved in epigenetic reprogramming of glioblastoma cancer stem cells.

Finally, we welcome our two youngest members of the group, Nico Emmerich Sandoval Vegas and Maximo Aaron Torrealba Vegas. Angela delivered Nico and Max on January 22nd. The boys keep mom busy and occasionally make appearances at the Koch in their double stroller.