Lauren is looking forward to presenting our new work on endosomal coat protein assembly and regulation at the 2025 Biophysical Society meeting in Los Angeles. Her talk will be on Tuesday, February 18, at 11am and will feature work published this week in Science Advances.

Cameron Cohen, graduate student, has written a lovely summary of Mintu and Amy's new paper published this week in Science Advances​. Check it out here! 

Lauren has been named a 2023 Chancellor Faculty Fellow. This program recognizes recently tenured faculty with an  institutional re-investment. The lab is deeply grateful to Vanderbilt and the Provost's Office for its ongoing support of our research program.

Thrilled to announce (after a too-long website hiatus) that Betty's paper characterizing the interaction between COPI and its ArfGAP has been published at the Journal of Cell Biology. Congratulations to everyone!

Please get in touch with Lauren if you are interested in rotating. The lab is a great place to train. We have an awesome lab manager (Amy), an experienced research assistant professor (Mintu), and two talented graduate students (Natalie & Cameron) to support you. We use a variety of techniques and approaches to answer fundamental questions about cell biology and human brain disease. We have multiple projects focused around important human protein complexes (retromer & sorting nexins, AP4, COPI). Options include:

1. Protein expression & purification (bacteria & mammalian cells)
2. Biochemistry: pulldown assays & calorimetry
3. Crystallization & X-ray crystallography, including small molecules/drugs
4. Single particle cryo-EM and cryo-ET
5. Imaging
6. Computational projects (AlphaFold modeling)

If you’re interested, please email your resume/CV and brief background summary (science courses, research interests) to Lauren. We’ll then set up a time to meet. We look forward to hearing from you!

The chair (Brandt) came by on Friday afternoon to tell us officially that Lauren will be promoted to associate professor with tenure. The lab had a little gift squirreled away, and fortunately Lauren also had a spare bottle of bubbly, because our NIH MIRA/R35 has also been renewed. A great week for the Jackson lab!

We are absolutely delighted to welcome a new graduate student, Cameron Cohen, into the Jackson lab. Cameron joins us from IGP after completing her bachelor's degree in Biology at Emory. 

Many thanks to NIGMS for featuring the lab on their Biomedical Beat blog this week. Lauren shared a little back about her undergraduate research background and perspective on science. The blog features a fantastic cryo-EM image from Amy Kendall, as well as the nerdiest picture of Lauren known to exist.

Dr. Xie has just accepted a postdoctoral position at Eli Lilly, based in San Diego. Very proud of Betty's many accomplishments in the lab and beyond. Can't wait to visit her in SD.