Lab Personnel

Bloom, Alex	Administrative Assistant for the lab.
Casati, Paula	I am analyzing an important environmental factor — UV-B — using maize cDNA microarrays and proteomics. For some candidate genes important in UV-B acclimation I'm determining whether RNAi knockdown mutants affect UV-B responses. I am now an Associate Professor at the Center of Photosynthesis and Biochemical Studies, University of Rosario, Argentina
DeSantola, Alicia	Undergraduate researcher working with postdoc Dave Skibbe.
Fernandes, John	I am the lab bioinformatics specialist and help analyze data and maintain the lab databases and records.  I do DNA sequence quality checking, perform BLAST searches and work on the annotation of our candidate genes from microarray experiments.
Kraszewska, Dominika	Lab assistant for the Walbot and Yanofsky labs.
Kwan, Tammy	Undergraduate researcher, working with Gillian Nan.
Le, Tien	Undergraduate working in the lab.
Ma, Jiong	Graduate student working on the anther development project on web-based display tools for illustrating microarray results in the context of maize gene family organization.  The latter project is a collaboration with Dmitri Petrov's laboratory.
Morrow, Darren	I generate sequence data from both EST and RescueMu transposon libraries & explore gene expression during germinal cell definition in maize. The latter project means I'm performing most of the microarray hybridizations for our analysis of anther development.
Nan, Gillian	I joined the lab to participate in the maize gene discovery project using a RescueMu transposon tagging strategy.  Now I'm studying the regulation of Mu in the context of the maize life cycle.
Pimentel, Sam	Undergraduate working with John Fernandes.
Shao, Wenqi	Undergraduate working with John Fernandes.
Skibbe, Dave	I am studying the impact that Mutator transposon activity has on the host by examining the transcriptome and proteome of active and epigenetically silenced sister maize lines at three developmental stages of anther development. As a side project, I am combining classical genetics and state-of-the-art proteomics techniques to identify genes involved in pollen development.
Tran, Ben	Undergraduate researcher, working with Gillian Nan.
Vonitter, Ray	Greenhouse Assistant, working at Plant Growth Facilities.
Walbot, Virginia Principal Investigator	My central interest is the mechanisms that create allelic diversity and modulate genome stability in plants.  We are currently trying to define how a "germinal" cell is specified-- that is cells whose descendants enter meiosis -- because Mu elements change their transposition biochemistry in germinal compared to somatic cells and genome changes are heritable only in the germinal cells.
Wilson, Dave	As the Plant Growth Facilities manager, I oversee the field conditions.
Yeh, Thomas	Undergraduate working with John Fernandes on organizing and databasing microarray data using the program R.

Alumni Personnel News

• Maria-Ines Benito is a collaborative investigator at Informax, Inc.
• John Bodeau is exploring SNPs in the human genome at Applied Biosystems
• Vicki Chandler, former postdoc, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, spring 2002
• Diane Chermak is a technician in Wolf Frommer's lab at the Carnegie Institution, Dept. Plant Biology, on campus.
• Yangrae Cho, former postdoc, is a researcher at Polytechnic in Virginia.
• Dave Duncan is working for Pioneer in Redwood City.
• Matt Fitzgerald - A former postdoc who left in mid-2004 to start his teaching career at local colleges.
• Mike Fromm, former postdoc, is the new director of the biotechnology center at the University of Nebraska
• Dean Goodman - A former graduate student now a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, Australia, working on the plant-derived genes in the malarial genome.
• Soo-Hwan Kim is now an assistant professor at Yonsei University in Korea.
• Lukas Mueller is now a senior researcher associate at Cornell.
• Brian Nakao - A former Maize Gene Discovery Project sequencing technician who produced most of our ESTs.  He's now working at a start-up biotech company.
• Akemi Ono studied the role of MURB, the helper protein of the Mu transposon system and is now doing research at the National Institute of Basic Biology in Aichi, Japan.
• Claudio Pairoba was a former postdoc and is now investigator for the Los Andes Online in Argentina.
• Wensheng Qin transferred to the Carnegie Institution on campus to do his post-doc.
• Manish Raizada is an assistant professor at the Univeristy of Guelph, Ontario Canada
• George Rudenko is working as a senior research scientist at BioRad in Hercules, CA.
• Khaled Sarsour, former DNA sequencing technician, is now a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the School of Public Health
• Bret Schneider - A former Maize Gene Discovery Project sequencing technician who produced most of our genomic sequence flanking RescueMu insertion sites.  He's now working at Ambion in Austin TX.
• Sejal Shah
• Ann Stapleton is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington
• Lily Yu