
Easing financial burden for first year graduate students
In 2019, Jane Miller, LAB’77, established the Robert B. Uretz, PhD, Memorial Awards in memory of her father, Robert Uretz, SB’47, PhD’54, and his commitment to graduate education. The awards, which provide financial support to incoming graduate students in the Division of the Biological Sciences...

BDC to sponsor 3 students to attend Bouchet Conference at Yale in April
This year the Biological Sciences Diversity Committee (BDC) would like to sponsor three BSD graduate students to attend the Bouchet Conference at Yale...

NIH awards $170M to national network of universities for Nutrition for Precision Health study
Public Health Sciences faculty member, Dr. Briseis Aschebrook-Kilfoy is leading the University of Chicago effort to contribute to an ambitious six university NIH research...

RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50% more potatoes, rice
Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University. In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein called FTO to both rice...

Access to medical radioisotopes spurs new research into disease
UChicago Medicine is the only academic health system in Illinois with an operational cyclotron. A cyclotron is a machine that accelerates a particle along a spiral path. The particle’s energy increases as it circulates through the machine. Once it has gained enough energy, the particle hits a...

Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Prize awarded to Silas Busch. Farrell, Hur, McIntire and Veseli also recognized
The 2020-2021 Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Prize for the best performance by a BSD graduate student who is TAing in fulfillment of the Divisional Teaching Requirement was awarded to Silas Busch. In addition, Divisional Teaching Assistant Awards went to Hannah Farrell, Suzy Hur, Erik...

UChicago and the idea of ecological succession
Ecological succession is the process by which the mix of species and habitat in an area changes over time. Gradually, these communities replace one another until a “climax community”—like a mature forest—is reached, or until a disturbance, like a fire, occurs.
Ecological succession is a...

Bensmaia lab receives nearly $10M to study the sensorimotor system
Understanding the relationship between somatosensation (the senses of touch and proprioception, or the sense of the body in space) and motor control is challenging — especially when it comes to understanding the exquisitely sensitive and delicate sensation and movement of the human hand.
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Yifei Hu helps develop reagent to improve CAR T-cell therapy
Over the past five years, a type of cancer treatment called CAR T-cell therapy has given some patients hope for remission. This technique adds a gene—called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR—to a patient’s immune cells, which helps these cells find and attack cancers.
Researchers at...

UChicago researchers help identify important site of vulnerability on influenza viruses
UChicago postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jenna Guthmiller is the first author on a study published in Nature on Dec. 23, which found that a small subset of antibodies elicited by experimental and existing influenza vaccines target a site at the base, or anchor, of the influenza virus...