News

Check out our People page and read about Matthew Kong, a microbiology PhD student who has joined the lab.

Welcome!

Allison and Gayani and Tuli attended the Midwest Viro meeting at UK (Lexington) in September. Great seeing old friends, making new ones. And super fun watching trainees network and catch up with people they had met at other meetings.

Allison and Gayani presented posters.

We have two outstanding teachers in the lab. In addition to Gayani receiving and AI award (see news below), Ciara received the Walter Konetzka Fellowship which is given to those who show “commitment to teaching and research.” Congrats!

She received “Best AI Award” for 2024-2025!

We had a blast hosting two students through the Jim Holland SSRP summer program. For five days, Ciara worked with Cecilia and Gayani worked with Kallan. Cecilia and Kallan both presented posters showcasing their results from the week.

Happy they chose our lab to work in 🙂

Graduation is near….you can tell as all the X499 students presented posters on their research. Megan was no exception. She was BUSY during the entire session. Hopefully people appreciated her work.

Gayani passed her prelims! We now have three PhD candidates in the lab. Congratulations to Allison, Ciara, and Gayani.

Congratulations to Ciara for successfully passing her preliminary exam. Happened in November, slow to post, apologies!

Tuli received the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Mentor award (1 of 2 given), and the ASM Alice C. Evans Award for Advancement of Women; recognizes outstanding contributions toward the full participation and advancement of women in the microbial sciences.

In February 2025, Tuli was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Many, many thanks to the people who nominated her and supported her.

Allison is an official PhD candidate. She passed her prelims! Congrats!

Well, we sure have been delinquent in updating this website. Not sure why….maybe we’ve been super busy 🙂
Here’s our news, as best as we can remember.

Fall 2023:
Former Lab Alums Haley and Shefah had BABIES!

Spring 2024:
Sonya Grewal worked with Dr. Ramsey (Texas A & M) during her senior year. She presented her work at the Honors College Poster session. Great success.

Sonya, Maya, and Erin have all graduated and moved on to bigger things. Sonya is attending Medical School, Maya has a job at Eli Lilly, and Erin is going to be Dr-Dr as she is in an MD/PhD program. Smart ladies, proud to have had them in the lab.

Summer 2024:
We had the priviledge of working with the Jim Holland Program again this year. Two days of virology experiments with 10 rising HS seniors.

Allison, Ciara, Gayani and Tuli attended ASV in Columbus, Ohio. Allison, Ciara, and Gayani all presented posters–first conference posters.

So much happened this summer and all so quickly.
–Megan Westrick, an undergraduate, joined the lab. She received funding from IU Advanced Summer Research Program and the Department of Chemistry. She got A LOT of good data for her poster.
–Jon graduated with his MS in Biotechnology. He is currently working in Jay Lennon’s lab at IU.
–Ben is headed north to University of Michigan where he is joining the PIBS (Program in Biomedical Sciences) PhD program.
–We worked with the Jim Holland Summer Program. Nine rising high school seniors had 1.5 days of hands-on virology. Absolute blast!!
–Wes and Tuli attended ASV, Wes presented!
–Tuli became an editor for Mini Reviews and GEMS with Journal of Virology. Contact her if you have ideas or want to read about something in particular.

Pictures are coming but until they do, check out @TuliLab to see all these cool things.

Congrats to Erin, new member of Phi Beta Kappa!

Kudos to Jon Gomez for doing a great job at the Biotech Poster Session.
First of hopefully many poster presentations.

Ciara Richardson, a Biochemistry graduate student, joined the lab. Learn more about her on our “People” page. Excited to have her on board.

Congratulations to Haley for defending her thesis and dissertation work. Haley was a joint student with Schlebach and Mukhopadhyay lab and initiated the work on alphavirus PRF, structural protein topology, and regulators of PRF in alphaviruses. She defended on September 1, or Back to Hogwarts Day. Of course the two labs planned a Harry Potter themed celebration!

Viruses are magical….we know that. One mechanism they use to increase their coding potential is programmed ribosomal frameshifting. Check out our perspective on how as a field we need to rethink how we identify frameshifting elements and determine cis and trans factors that are necessary to regulate programmed frameshifting, especially during viral infections.

Also this month, Wes became a true virologist. He gave a short talk at ASV in the Togavirus section. Welcome to the club, Wes.

Ben Pockrass graduated with a BS in Biochem and has stayed on to work as a research associate in the lab. He’s our cloning guru and hopes to gain more lab experience before heading to grad school Fall 2023.

Not sure why we weren’t better about updating the webpage last semester, you’d think being on sabbatical I’d be on top of things.

Where to start?

October: I visited Wendy Maury at University of Iowa. We brainstormed about experiments and I did my first (and probably last for a while) animal experiment.

December: Julie Button is now Julie Button, PhD!!!! She defended in December, and her family was able to come out for the defense. What a way to end 2021!

December: Allison Houghton, a microbiology grad student, joined the lab. We are excited to have her on board. She’ll have a personal blurb up soon in the people section.

January: Sophia, Shefah, Brian, and Joe had their paper on inter-dimer spike contacts accepted to Journal of Virology. Sophia and Brian’s first paper!

We have been fortunate to have a long-standing collaboration with the Weaver lab at UTMB. Our latest work, “Lineage Divergence and Vector-Specific Adaptation Have Driven Chikungunya Virus onto Multiple Adaptive Landscapes,” has been accepted in mBio.