News and Fun

News & Fun

January 2023

Lab undergraduates Gamaliel Luna Ahumada, Aditi Ghosh and Susan Sharpe presented a poster on their work at the annual Undergraduate Biology Research Conference! Their poster was constantly busy with lots of curious folks wanting to hear about how much they’ve done (in only 6 months) to work out the methods for a new project. Congratulations!

Kiara, Gamaliel, Aditi, Susan, and Martha at the poster session.

December 2023

We said goodbye to Hannatu Ismail, who is leaving us to move to Dallas with her husband and to ultimatly pursue a masters degree in bioinformatics. We will miss you, Hannatu!

November 2023

We received the Notice of Award for the lab’s R01 renewal! Hip hip hooray! Lots of folks contributed to making this grant successful, both past and present lab members. The grant will fund both mouse and Drosophila work on the mechanisms of TMEM184B in synaptic disruption and will build some fly models of TMEM184B-associated diseases.

We had a belated lab celebration for Liz Wright and Erik Larsen’s paper on hippocampal gene alterations and behavioral changes in TMEM184B mutant mice, published in September in BMC Genomics! Liz and Erik are both PhD students in the Neuroscience GIDP. Other authors include Cece Roessle and Hannah Hart, both former undergraduate phenoms in the lab.

At Agave House for happy hour! From R, Liz Wright, Hazel White, Martha Bhattacharya, Aditi Ghosh, Kiara Bachtle, Zac Yahiku, Andy Powell, and Hannatu Ismail.

October 2023

Research Technician Andy Powell presents a poster at the Cold Spring Harbor Labs meeting on Drosophila Neurobiology. Lots of great discussions and collaborations to come as a result. Great job, Andy!

August 2023

Our review on Peripheral Nerve Injury models in Drosophila has been accepted in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience!

May 2023

  • Martha receives tenure! Hip hip hooray! The lab gets a big cake to celebrate. 🙂
  • Cece and Rachel graduate with honors! We are all SO proud of you. We had a big lab BBQ and graduation party in late April to celebrate.
  • We welcome two new PhD students – Zac Yahiku (Neuroscience PhD program) and Kiara Bachtle (Pharmacology/Toxicology PhD program). Zac will be working on the signaling and biochemistry of TMEM184B, and Kiara will be working on glia-neuron communication strategies.
  • Three new undergraduates join the lab through the UBRP summer program: Gamaliel Luna Ahumada, Aditi Ghosh, and Susan Sharpe. They will be working as a team on the NSF CAREER funded projects.

March 2023

  • We can finally share the big news: Martha received a National Science Foundation CAREER award! This is the most prestigious award given by NSF to junior faculty, and it supports those with both outstanding research and outreach/education commitments. We are really excited to begin our work on this grant, which starts in April 2023! Here is the press release from the College of Science!
  • Cece Roessle, a senior in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science major (NSCS) and doing her honors thesis in the lab, won BOTH the Outstanding Senior and Excellence in Undergraduate Research awards from the NSCS program! Woohoo, congrats Cece!
  • Rachel Becker, a senior undergraduate in the Bhattacharya lab and an alumni of the VIP course, earned admission to three different PhD programs! Hooray! Next year she’ll be pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
  • Hannah Hart, a former student in the lab, was accepted into medical school at the University of Arizona! Congrats, future Dr. Hart!!

Jan-Feb 2023

  • Martha is deep in grant writing for the NIH deadlines. Somehow the sign in the department coffee area seems appropriate.

September 2022

  • Our lab’s work was featured on Arizona Public Media (NPR) Science Friday! Dr. Leslie Tolbert interviewed Dr. Martha Bhattacharya about our recent Molecular Neurobiology paper linking fly phenotypes to hyperexcitability of neurons and about the implications of our work for diseases like epilepsy. Congrats to all who contributed to this work, especially Tiffany Cho and Nat Klein!

August 2022-March 2023 

  • We had many rotation students working on lots of different projects in the lab! ZacYahiku, Allyssa Joe Winter, Danielle DiFranco, and Collin Kryzyaniak all did rotations. It is such fun to have so many new faces around! We went out to celebrate at Gentle Ben’s.

August 2022

  • Hannatu Ismail joins the lab as a Research Technician! Welcome Hannatu! Hannatu will be working on creating new gene edited iPSC lines to model patient variants of TMEM184B. 

June 2022

  • Rachel Becker, a student in Martha’s VIP course, is now officially on the Bhattacharya Lab Team! She’ll be continuing some work from the course and also new projects doing CRISPR in flies. Welcome Rachel!
  • We say goodbye to two lab members this month. Gaige Tucker has graduated with his B.S. in Neuroscience and will begin a clinical research position at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Ted Wickstead will be starting a postdoctoral position on neuroimmunology and microglia at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in NYC. Best of luck to you both! We’ll miss you!
  • Martha turns in her dossier for tenure. Whew! 300+ pages of documentation down…

May 2022

  • The lab welcomes Andy Powell as a Research Technician! Hip hip hooray!
  • At the end of the month, we said goodbye to Tiffany Cho, who heads off to start medical school in Fall. Best of luck, Tiffany! We will miss you!

March 2022

  • Liz Wright passed her oral comprehensive exam! We went out for drinks to celebrate. Pictured below are Tiffany and Liz, enjoying themselves!
  • Martha was awarded the Margaret M. Briehl and Dennis T. Ray Five Star Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence! This is a university-wide teaching award that is given to one faculty member each year for the last 39 years, based completely on a student-led nomination and evaluation process. Martha was surprised by a bunch of students, faculty, and donors in her classroom who brought flowers and cookies and made speeches! Wow, what an honor and a huge surprise! Thank you to all who participated in the nomination and evaluation, and thanks to Cece Roessle who thought to take a picture.
  • We submitted our R01 renewal in early March! Data from both manuscripts as well as essential new unpublished data from Erik Larsen, Eric Janezic and Ted Wickstead went into this grant. Congrats to all! Now the waiting begins…
  • Martha gave a talk at the Peripheral Neuropathy Center at Dong-A University in South Korea. (Sadly, it was virtual.)
  • We welcomed Derek Resio as a rotation student from the Neuroscience GIDP program. Welcome, Derek!

January 2022

  • Our paper on the Drosophila TMEM184B ortholog, Tmep, was accepted for publication in Molecular Neurobiology! Hip hip hooray! Congratulations to Tiffany and Nat, who are co-first authors on this paper. (You can find the link to the Biorxiv version on the “publications” tab.) We went out to celebrate at a cool rooftop bar at the Graduate Hotel:

December 2021

  • We had a great joint Bhattacharya labs holiday party! As usual, no one thought to take any pictures. 🙁 The best white elephant gift might have been the cookie baking kit! (Or was it the book about the history of mullets?)
  • Martha received a renewal of her Dean’s Education funding to support the Vertically Integrated Project course research experiences for students. Yay!
  • We said goodbye to Erik as he leaves to pursue preparatory work towards his goal of a data analytics role in Major League Baseball. You will be very much missed!!

November 2021

  • Erik successfully defended his dissertation! He gave a wonderful talk and we then celebrated with a backyard bash at Martha’s.

Erik before his talk

Erik and Martha after the defense 
  • We welcomed Emily Burke as a rotation student from the Genetics GIDP program. Welcome, Emily!

October 2021

  • Liz Wright was awarded TWO travel grants – one from the Society for Neuroscience and one from the Graduate Council at UA – to attend the SFN meeting (yay!) which was then immediately cancelled (at least the in-person component) (boo!). 
  • Nevertheless, we persisted…. in going out for a lab lunch! 
Lunch at Gentle Ben’s Patio. October 2021

September 2021

  • We have finally finished and submitted our next manuscript, on Drosophila locomotion and excitability phenotypes of Tmep (Drosophila TMEM184B) mutant. You can see it on BioRxiv here. This paper is the result of an outstanding collaboration we have with Dr. Sean Sweeney at the University of York.
  • Martha is awarded the University of Arizona College of Sciences’s Distinguished Early Career Teaching Award for her work in the classroom. Congratulations! Here is the news release. If you’d like to see what we do in our course-based research experience (CURE) class, Brain Communication Networks, check out the Wiki that students produced at the end of the Spring and Fall 2021 semesters.

July 2021

  • Our paper on the itch and sensory development phenotypes of TMEM184b mutant mice is FINALLY in press, at PAIN! Find it here. Congratulations to everyone for their hard work (and perseverence through the pandemic publishing process)! This article was also chosen as the feature article for the issue, and so we were invited to create a video abstract, which you can see here!
  • Martha submits an application to the NSF CAREER program. Lots of work went into this application, which merges both scientific directions and educational directions.

June 2021

  • Martha submits an R21 for the human TMEM project. We are excited to see how much we can learn to help the patients with TMEM184B mutations!
  • Eric Janezic accepts a new position, as a Scientist in Molecular Pharmacology at Genentech! We are super excited for him, although sad he’ll be leaving us soon!

May 2021

  • Hannah Hart graduates with her Bachelor’s Degree from the Neuroscience Undergraduate Program! Congrats Hannah!
  • We welcome the 2nd lab baby! Eric and Miki have a beautiful baby girl, Finn, at the end of May. Congratulations!
  • We are finally able to relax rules on mask wearing, cleaning, and distancing in the lab since we are all vaccinated. What a relief!

April 2021

  • We have a lab outdoor gathering at Reid Park to celebrate the upcoming graduation of Hannah and the birth of Eric and Miki’s first child!

March 2021

  • Optimism is palpable because everyone in the lab is getting their first/second vaccine shots. Thank goodness…

January 2021

  • Martha launches the first edition of her Course-Based Research Experience, called Brain Communication Networks! This semester she has 13 guinea pigs (er, students) and we are doing some awesome R/Cyverse as well as fruit fly projects (later, if we are allowed to be in proximity).

November-December 2020 –

  • Liz Shelton was awarded Outstanding Senior in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science for the December 2020 graduating class. Congratulations, Liz!!
  • Will McLean, a PhD student in Neuroscience, begins a rotation in our lab. Welcome, Will!
  • Martha was awarded the two small grants to support her new class! The money will be used for dissection tools, lab reagents, and flow cytometry expenses to allow undergraduate students to isolate and molecularly profile different Drosophila brain cell types. Hooray!

October 2020-

  • It’s been a busy writing month! We submitted multiple grants and fellowships this month: Liz Wright submitted her NSF GRFP application, and Ted Wickstead worked with Martha to write and submit an R03 to the NINDS. Liz Shelton submitted an application to the NSDEG graduate fellowship program. Martha submitted two small internal grant applications to support the new course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE)/Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) course in Brain Communication Networks. Stay tuned for results!

July 2020 –

  • We welcomed Dr. Eric Janezic as a postdoc in the lab! Eric did his PhD at the University of Washington and, prior to that, was in one of the first graduating classes from the U of A Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program. He is participating in the T32 training program on Aging and Neurodegeneration. Welcome (back), Eric!
  • We said goodbye to Nat Klein, who is starting his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Best of luck, Nat! We’ll miss you!

June 2020 –

May 2020 –

  • Martha is a featured faculty member in this month’s issue of the Daily Wildcat! See the article here: https://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/2020/05/n-neurodegeneration-protein
  • Elizabeth Wright joins the lab as a PhD student in the Neuroscience GIDP program. Welcome, Liz! We are so happy you’ve decided to join.
  • Ted hosts a fantastic Zoom pub trivia hour, where it becomes clear that there are large deficiencies in our collective lab knowledge of all things UK. Looking forward to the next one!
  • Operation TP and Mask Drop is successful! Everyone now has toilet paper and masks. Better than Christmas! 🙂

April 2020 –

  • We receive the supplement! Yay! This will support additional personnel working on our Drosophila projects.

March 2020 –

  • Covid-19 chaos begins.

February 2020 –

  • Martha submits both an R01 on the itch project, and a supplement application for her current R01. Man, that was hard work…
  • Elizabeth Shelton joins the lab as an undergradaute researcher. Liz will do her honors thesis in NSCS in the lab. Welcome, Liz!
  • Nat finds out that he has been accepted into the Johns Hopkins PhD program in Cell and Developmental Biology! Woohoo!! We went out for a lab happy hour to celebrate.
  • Bhagyashree leaves to begin a new position in the Porreca Lab at the UA Pharmacology department. Good luck, Bhagyashree!

January 2020 –

  • Our paper is now on BioRxiv! Larsen et al., Tmem184b controls pruriceptive development to allow itch sensation. Link here. Almost the entire lab contributed in some form to this paper, our first out of the lab! Congrats to all and thanks for all the hard work! Stay tuned for peer review and publication!
  • Katherin Gabriel begins a (very short! 8 week) rotation. She is in the ABBS program.

November 2019 –

  • Kelsy Nilles and Andrew Tang begin rotations in the lab. They are both first year Neuroscience GIDP students. Welcome!

October 2019 – 

  • I think we won both the Halloween costume contest AND the pumpkin carving contest in the Neuroscience department (well, if there were winners…).
Martha, Tiffany, Bhagyashree, and Nat after pumpkin carving
Nat, Marie Kondo (Tiffany), a vampire (Bhagyashree), Gandolf (Erik), Dorothy (Martha), and Liz

September 2019 –

  • Martha gives a talk at the Arizona ALS Meeting, held on our campus in Tucson, AZ.

August 2019 –

  • One of Martha’s former neural development students, Ms. Lola Lozano (UA ’19), is writing a series of blog posts on Women in Science, and she featured Martha in one of her recent postings! Here is the link: Common Science – Martha Bhattacharya, Ph.D.

June 2019 – 

  • Martha receives funding through a Bio5 Team Scholars Award to pursue a collaborative project with Dr. Fei Yin, Assistant Director of Translational Neuroscience at the Center for Innovation in Brain Sciences. The project focuses on cell-cell communication in the brain and will be the work of postdoc Dr. Bhagyashree Manivannan.
  • Daniela Liera, a Tucson-native and Harvard undergraduate, joins the lab for the summer. Welcome, Daniela!
  • Martha gives a talk at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU). So many fantastic scientists and friends here!
  • We have a lab breakfast at Baja Cafe, Erik’s favorite brunch spot (L to R: Bhagyashree, Gaige, Erik, Hannah, Nat, Martha)

May 2019 –

March 2019 – 

We say goodbye to Matt McBride, who is moving to a new position doing clinical research at Roche Diagnostics! We all went out for happy (sad) hour to celebrate his new position.

L to R: Martha, Bhagyashree, Nat, Matt, and Erik

January 2019 –

  • We welcome Bhagyashree Manivannan to the lab as a postdoctoral fellow!
  • Erik will attend a meeting on Molecular Neurodegeneration in London, where he will present a poster and learn the latest new technologies we can apply to our scientific questions.
  • We welcome Suvitha Loganathan as a rotation student from the ABBS graduate program.

December 2018 –

  • We had a great Double Bhattacharya Labs Christmas Party! The White Elephant gift exchange was awesome. The party was SO good that no one took any pictures (or is saving them for blackmail later…)

November 2018 –

  • Martha gave a talk at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, CA.

October 2018 –

Here’s a photo of the lab at our department Halloween party! From L to R: Gingervitis (Erik), ListerMEAN (Matt), Donatello(?) (Martha), a gnat (Nat), Han Solo (Gaige). Not pictured: Tessa

September 2018 –

  • We welcome Gaige Tucker, a freshman biochemistry major, and Tessa Spangler, a freshman pre-NSCS major, to the lab to work on fly axon degeneration projects.
  • Martha gave two talks: one at the Arizona Wellbeing Commons, section on Neurodegenerative Diseases, and one at the BMCB graduate program retreat at the Biosphere 2 in Oracle, AZ.
  • Martha found out that she was awarded extra funding on her NIH grant to support new research directions on Alzheimer’s Disease. Hip hip hooray!

August 2018 –

  • We welcome Erik Larsen who is officially joining the lab as a PhD student in Neuroscience!
  • We also say goodbye to Megan and Drew, our awesome summer students.
  • Erik presented a poster, and Martha gave a talk, at the LiveLikeLou Symposium on ALS Research held at the University of Pittsburgh. This was a wonderful meeting, and a great organization who is gearing up to support ALS research.
  • Kelsey Bernard comes to the lab as a rotation student from the ABBS graduate program.

July 2018 –

  • The lab welcomes Megan Cracciolo, a summer undergraduate from UCLA (and a native of Tucson). Welcome, Megan! The lab is buzzing with energy and new science this summer!
  • The lab’s R01 funding officially begins! Hip hip hooray!

June 2018 –

  • The lab welcomes Nat Klein, a new Research Technician who just graduated from Reed College.
  • Welcome to Drew Daniels, a former research student of Dr. Bhattacharya’s from the St. Louis College of Pharmacy who is visiting for the summer.

May 2018 – The lab welcomes Erik Larsen as a PhD rotation student from the GIDP Neuroscience program. The lab has a joint barbecue with members of Deepta Bhattacharya’s lab  in mid-May. Look for more of these to come!

April 2018 – Martha gives a talk at the Border Biomedical Research Center at the University of Texas, El Paso (UTEP). It was a great trip that included catching up with old friends and making some new ones!

February 12, 2018 – We got a great score on our R01!  Congratulations to everyone whose data went into this grant, including Matt McBride and Hector Garcia!

February 7th, 2018 – Welcome to Tapas Arakeri, a rotation student from the GIDP in Neuroscience.

February 2, 2018 – The lab says goodbye to Mere French, a founding member of the lab. Good luck, Mere!

December 18, 2018 – Congratulations to Matt McBride on the birth of his son, Lucas!

Nov 28th, 2017 – Martha presented a talk at the U of A MCB seminar series at 11am in ENR2 S107. As a result, she is now part of the BMCB and ABBS PhD programs on campus. Students from these programs are welcome to contact Martha for a rotation!

November 2017 –  Matthew McBride joined our lab as a Research Specialist. Welcome, Matt!

October 2017 – Martha presents an invited seminar at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ

October 2017 – Martha presents a poster on new phenotypes of fly CG12004 at the Cold Spring Harbor meeting on Drosophila Neurobiology. Authors include Hector Garcia, Martha Kiela, and Brenden Wright (STLCOP). Congrats to all!

9/26/2017 – Martha will present at the UA Neuroscience Colloquium, being held at 4pm in Gould-Simpson Hall 601. Please come!

9/21/2017 – We are sad to say goodbye to Chelsea Jarvis, who leaves us for New Mexico. Best of luck, Chelsea!

September 2017 – Martha gives a talk at the Arizona ALS Symposium at the Biosphere 2 (Oracle, AZ).

August 2017 – Welcome to Hector Garcia, a new undergraduate!

July 2017 – Chelsea Jarvis has joined the lab as a Research Technician, and Martha Kiela has joined as an undergraduate. Welcome to both Chelsea and Martha!

March 2017 – Martha gave an oral presentation at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Meeting in Arlington, VA.

Feb 2017 – Mere French has joined the lab as a Research Technician. Welcome, Mere!