This page celebrates the many successes of our brillant lab members!
Delighted to see work from our lab, which has been percolating for some time, now hitting the journals! Kudos to Amanda Tse, who, along with her co-first authors, played a key role in advancing two very impressive papers published today. Congratulations also to Xinmin Chang on an outstanding discovery revealing roles for monoaminergic neurotransmitters in mediating intracellular protein aggregation. And finally, a big congratulations to Isis Janilkarn-Urena for a creative new formulation that pushes solubility limits. A huge thank you to all our collaborators and this incredible team!
Papers linked below:
Monoaminergic neurotransmitters are bimodal effectors of tau aggregation | Science Advances
Our structure paper on tau makes the Top 25 list for Life & Biological Sciences Articles of 2022:
One of Nature Communications 25 most downloaded articles in the life and biological sciences published from 2022.
Paper linked here: https://www.nature.com/collections/dgiidcjfdh
November 2024: Many thanks to the Daniel J. Epstein Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Research Fund for a FY25 award to investigate the disentangling effects by a new class of tau inhibitors. Good going, Nader, on this new and exciting series of compounds!
November 2024: Congratulations, Jinliang, on publishing your tau biosensor cell seeding article in Structure!
This is an impressive body of data and meticulous work, published in a very well-deserved, prestigious journal.
Paper linked here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1k1Jg3SNvcAcM9
August 2024: Nader Mostowfi receives Poster Award at the Mann USC School of Pharmacy Moving Targets Symposium. Way to go!!!
April 2024: Lot's of good news this spring!
Congrats to Haley Jun on her admission at Cedars-Sinai for PhD studies in Biomedical Sciences!
Congrats to Amanda Tse on her admission for PhD studies at USC!
Congrats to Xinmin Chang on her admission for PhD studies at Cornell University!
Congrats to Bliss Aguirre on her Urso Student Fellowship awarded by CurePSP for sponsored PhD research this summer!
September 2023: Congrats to Amanda Tse and Haley Jun! Both were awarded Provost’s Research Fellowships for Fall 2023!
August 2023: Our lab was awarded a BrightFocus Alzheimer's Disease Research grant for the development of metabolically improved natural product formulations and synthetic alternatives to support healthier brain aging. Thanks to BrightFocus & Alzheimer’s LA for supporting this research, and our partnering labs--Daryl Davies, Hovhannes Gukasyan, and the USC Medicinal Chemistry Core!
July 2023: Haley Jun presented at the Gateway Scholars Symposium on her work on CryoEM structures of amyloid beta with mentor Angela Albanese. Congrats to Haley on her good work and her award from the Gateway Scholars Research Program! Pictured above (Haley) amongst fellow Research Gateway Scholars from her cohort!
June 2023: Bliss Tafolla-Aguirre, recipient of the 2022-2023 Culty Graduate Student Diversity Scholarship award from USC School of Pharmacy! The award recognizes her excellent performance among entering Ph.D. graduate student in the PHTS program and her outstanding potential to be a leader in the pharmaceutical sciences.
May 2023: Congratulations to Amanda Tse on her Scholarship Award from the highly prestigious Astronaut Scholarship Foundation! This selective award reflects meritorious pursuits and students with aptitudes to tackle the toughest challenges of our day.
May 2023: Congratulations to Amanda Tse, one of two Poster Award recipients at the 2023 ADC Collaborative Conference at UC Irvine!
May 2023: We welcome Bliss Aguirre, PhD candidate as a new Lab Member!
April 2023: Congrats to Nader Mostowfi on his admission to the USC Keck PIBBS PhD program!
April 2023: Angela Albanese concluded her qualifying exam with the highest possible marks. Well done!
Nov 2022: The lab was awarded two grants with co-PI's Ralf Langen and Peter Chung from the Epstein Family Foundation. Our reseach focuses on investigating structures of cell-derived and recombinantly-expressed/post-translationally modified tau aggregates, and determining small molecule inhibitor binding sites on amyloid beta plaques by CryoEM.