Author: Jessica

We are happy to officially welcome a new graduate student to the lab – Sara Brigida! Can’t wait to see all that you accomplish!

A big welcome to 2 graduate students rotating in the lab this semester – Isabel Ross and Susan Moradi Nasab! Glad to have you with us!

We are excited to share our first paper from 2022, now published in Neurobiology of Disease! This was a rather monumental undertaking by recently graduated Dr. May Ribeiro to uncover new insights into the ability of vitamin D to modulate behaviors and the cortical transcriptome in Mecp2+/- Rett syndrome model mice! Congrats May!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969996122000274?via%3Dihub

Welcome to new rotating graduate student Yiling Lan – glad to have you on the team!

Congratulations to Dr. Mayara Ribeiro who absolutely rocked her thesis defense! We are so proud of the first PhD graduate of the MacDonald lab!

Our newest study is now posted on bioRxiv! Congrats on this fantastic work go to the soon to defend May! We identified over 200 genes whose dysregulated expression in the Mecp2 heterozygous cortex is rescued by dietary vitamin D and we found that motor and anxiety-like phenotypes in these Rett syndrome model mice are modulated by vitamin D. Check it out here:

https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2021.06.30.450587v1

Our newest review article is now out in Neurochemistry International! This is part of a special issue on Epigenetics in Nervous System Development and Function that I am working on as a guest editor. Check out the paper with the link below and stay tuned for the link to the completed special issue!

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1d9-Jio-uwpu8

Congratulations to Alaba who was awarded the top poster prize in Biology at the Syracuse University Undergraduate Research Day! And even bigger congrats on being selected as a University Scholar, the highest achievement for graduating students at SU! Best of luck in medical school and we hope to win you back to research some day!!!

A big welcome to our new research associate Angelica Kowalchuk, and rotating graduate student Clementine Harvey! We are also happy to say that CJ Arnell is no longer a rotating grad student is now a member of the MacDonald Lab. We are glad to have you all on board!

It’s a busy time in the MacDonald lab – a big welcome to postdoctoral fellow Ashis Sinha and our two new rotating graduate students, CJ Arnell and Jiali He.