Blog

We are thrilled to announce that Arthur Cheng will be joining the lab as graduate student #23 (!). Arthur is himself surprised to be joining the Vance Lab, as he didn’t really imagine that he would join an immunology lab for his PhD. However, his project will be to decipher the mechanism by which the SP140 chromatin regulator represses gene expression — so more “immunology-adjacent” than pure immunology.

Arthur grew up in China and attended San Diego State University for his undergraduate work. He worked for three years in Anjana Rao’s Lab at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, studying DNA methylation and cancer. In his spare time, Arthur enjoys fishing and snowboarding. He is excited to learn about the coevolution of pathogens and the immune system.

In other good news:

– Bianca Parisi passed her qualifying exam with flying colors and has thus assumed her position as PhD Candidate (#22).

– The 20 year Barton-Vance lab reunion has been announced. Dates are: June 20-22, 2025 (more than a year from now). Contact Russell if you were inadvertently left off the invite list and you want to come.

– Several folks have left (or are leaving) the lab for greener pastures: Ella Brydon, Ophelia Lee, and Joshua Mao are all starting PhD programs on the east coast in the Fall. Congrats to all of them on their accomplishments!

– Kristen Witt obtained her PhD in December and is considering her next moves while finishing up her paper as a postdoc in the lab.

– The lab is undergoing a renovation! We will be getting new benchtops, a new paint job, and refinished cabinetry. We are temporarily moving into the former Winoto Lab space while the work is being done.

– After a hiatus of several years, the Sugar Daddies (aka Greg and Russell) returned as champions of the annual Barton-Vance Bocce Tournament, defeating the Caramelizers (aka Dmitri and Stefan). As a result, Greg and Russell retain the rights to decide which lab meeting they don’t want to hear (or can sell the rights to the lab meeting exemption to a needy lab member).

There are several good pieces of news to report:

(1) Former postdoctoral fellow Patrick Mitchell has been announced as an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. This will provide significant support for his new and rapidly growing lab at the University of Washington. Congrats Patrick!

(2) We have just welcomed a new graduate student to the lab, Bianca Parisi. Bianca will be working on a collaborative project with the lab of Filipa Rijo-Ferreira at Berkeley. Bianca grew up in Italy and attended UCSD for her undergraduate studies. She then completed a Master’s degree in Sue Kaech’s lab at the Salk. We are thrilled to have her join the lab!

(3) More good news: Our current second year PhD student, Charlotte Langner, has passed her qualifying exam! The lab threw Charlotte a fantastic party with a circus theme, in honor of Charlotte’s passion for acrobatics. See photo below.

(4) And last but not least, two of our current postdoctoral fellows (Kevin Eislmayr and Stefan Fattinger) have each recently welcomed new members to their families. Baby Eli Eislmayr was born in November 2022, and Baby Anea Fattinger was just born a few days ago! The future of science is looking bright 🙂

The lab is excited to welcome a new postdoc — Grace Liu, who has transplanted herself from Boston, where she was a student in the Sabatini and Perrimon labs. As a graduate student, Grace did some beautiful work identifying nutrient sensors in Drosophila. For her postdoc, Grace is excited to pursue new pathways of “effector-triggered immunity” in vertebrates. Grace is happily adjusting to life in California—and gloating to all her friends on the East Coast. She is looking forward to seeing Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the SF Opera in a few months.

We are all delighted to welcome Charlotte Langner to the lab for her PhD. Charlotte hails from Missoula, Montana where she went to college before spending two years at the NIH as a postbac in Jason Brenchley’s lab studying interactions between the microbiome and SIV. Outside of lab, Charlotte enjoys the great outdoors and is an aficionado of partner acrobatics. No cartwheels in the lab please, Charlotte!

We are delighted to welcome Kevin Eislmayr and Stefan Fattinger as two new postdoctoral fellows to the lab.

Stefan is from Switzerland where he conducted his PhD on Salmonella, jointly mentored by Wolf-Dietrich Hardt (at ETH Zürich) and Mikael Sellin (at Uppsala, Sweden). As a graduate student Stefan published papers demonstrating the role of TNF in intestinal tissue destruction and the mechanism of Salmonella entry into gut epithelial cells in vivo. Stefan will be leaving the gut and will focus on M. tuberculosis lung infections during his postdoc.

Kevin is from Austria where he conducted his PhD with Pavel Kovarik at the University of Vienna. Kevin’s PhD concerned the surprising non-redundancy of IL-1 alpha and IL-1 beta. In contrast to Stefan, Kevin will be moving his interests into the gut, and will be studying Shigella pathogenesis in our new in vivo model.

With the recent departure of Mortiz Gaidt for greener pastures, we delighted to have now replenished our supply of native German speakers. Wecome to Berkeley, Kevin and Stefan!

The Vance Lab is thrilled to officially welcome our newest graduate student, Janet Babirye, to the lab. Janet hails from Kampala, Uganda, and attended Makerere University. During her MSc, she studied alternative diagnostic biomarkers for tuberculosis under Dr. Misaki Wayengera. She first visited Berkeley in 2019 as a visiting student to Sarah Stanley’s lab, before deciding to join the MCB program at Berkeley for her PhD. She is excited to continue working on host-pathogen interactions in the Vance Lab. For her PhD, Janet will be studying the adaptive immune response to Shigella flexneri, taking advantage of our new mouse model for Shigella that makes possible physiologically relevant in vivo immunological analyses of this important pathogen for the first time. In her free time, Janet enjoys dancing, running, hiking, and cooking. We are delighted to have Janet join the Vance Lab!

Well, it’s been about a year since the last website update…and what a year it has been. There is no point belaboring the challenges of doing research under pandemic restrictions, but I’m proud of the tremendous resilience shown by the lab. If nothing else, this year has confirmed the vital importance of research on infectious diseases.

A few updates:

– Three postdoctoral fellows have departed for greener pastures in the past year: Andrew Sandstrom is now an Asst Prof at UT Southwestern, Patrick Mitchell is now an Asst Prof at University of Washington, and Lívia Yamashiro is now a scientist at Arcus Biosciences. We miss them all dearly!

– Our R01 grant application on Shigella was funded and we are now excited to pursue our work on this fascinating and important human pathogen. Our collaborative P01 application (with Sarah Stanley, Jeff Cox and Dan Portnoy (PI)) received a good score and we anxiously await the Notice of Award. This P01 is now largely focused on M. tuberculosis, the major interest of Dmitri and Marian in the lab.

– Katie took advantage of her diminished time in lab during the pandemic to write a terrific review in Nature Immunology on inflammasomes and adaptive immunity. I encourage you to take a look!

– Patrick, Justin, Elizabeth, and Roberto (along with collaborators including the Lesser and Rauch Labs) published the lab’s first Shigella paper in eLife. Justin is now busily following up on this work, with help from our current rotation student, Janet Babirye.

– Our lab manager Peter has been accepted to the MCB PhD program at the University of Washington and plans to attend in the Fall. Congrats Peter!

I haven’t updated the lab website in about a year…and there has been quite a bit of good news that has accumulated, which I will try to recap in this one “catch-up” post. In no particular order…:

• We’ve published a few papers: Price et al solved the mystery of what IFN gamma-induced factors are required for control of Legionella replication; Ji et al published what we hope is the first in a long string of papers on M. tuberculosis; Gonçalves and Margolis et al published the collaborative results of Dario Zamboni’s sabbatical visit to the lab; two other collaborative papers (Tenthorey et al and Burke et al) were also published; and most recently, we received the good news that Yamashiro et al (originally released on bioRxiv) has been accepted for publication (stay posted).

• Daisy and Kristen, along with various collaborators, reported on bioRxiv their discovery of Sp140 as the gene within the Sst1 locus that causes susceptibility to tuberculosis

• Elizabeth was awarded an NSF Fellowship and passed her qualifying exams (taken over zoom under less-than-ideal circumstances). Congrats Elizabeth!

• Patrick and Justin, along with collaborative help from several others, revealed to the world their new oral infection model for Shigella, launching an entirely new and exciting direction of research for the lab. This was followed up by news that the lab received a fundable 6%ile score on their Shigella R01.

• We also received news that we have been awarded a grant from the Bakar Fellows program to try to translate some recent unpublished discoveries from Moritz into novel human therapeutics. Based on work done by Patrick in the lab, we also received seed funding from the CEND Covid Catalyst fund to investigate a possible role for inflammasomes in COVID-19.

• Patrick and Andrew wrapped up successful job hunts — in a very very challenging academic job market. Stay posted for official news soon…

• A huge accomplishment involving several folks in the lab was our collaborative submission of the renewal of our P01 project grant. Phew!

• The most recent good news is that after 14 weeks of COVID-related shut down, the lab is now back in operation (at ~25% capacity). It’s been great to see how resilient everyone has been — taking advantage of time away from the lab to gather their thoughts, acquire new bioinformatic skills, submit and re-submit papers, write reviews, etc. But I think it is fair to say we are all excited to be back in the lab (even if only part time).

The Vance Lab is delighted to welcome two new graduate students to the lab, Marian Fairgrieve and Brenna Remick.

Marian is from Seattle, WA and attended the University of Washington. As an undergrad, she studied developmental physiology at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center under Dr. Adam Luckenbach. Marian then joined the world of immunology as a researcher in the lab of Dr. Michael Gale. She’s very excited to continue working on innate immunology at UC Berkeley! When not in lab, Marian is somewhere in the great outdoors!

Brenna is from New Jersey and attended Cornell University, where she did cancer research in the lab of Dr. Robert Weiss. She’s excited to try her hand at studying host-pathogen interactions. When not in lab, Brenna enjoys running, board games, and trying new food. 

We are thrilled to welcome our newest graduate student, Elizabeth Turcotte, to the lab. Elizabeth hails from Cedar Falls Iowa, and attended the University of Northern Iowa, where she worked on Leishmania with Dr. Nilda Rodriguez. Elizabeth then did a 2-year postbac at the NIH studying mitosis in the lab of Dr. Mary Dasso. She is happy to be back in the world of host-pathogen interactions. When not in lab, you can find Elizabeth at home looking after her 2 cats, her tortoise, and her fish.