Fall/Winter 2024

Phew! The rest of 2024 truly flew by. But that also means we have a lot of news and accomplishments to celebrate!

• New Lab Members! ​
  • This summer we welcomed Kai Gurnoe-Brantley (Summer 2023 REU student) back into the lab as a research technician. Kai has been helping with collecting more mice for and managing our ever-growing colony of deer mice in addition to histological data collection and cooking up some new projects on testes!
  • We've also now welcomed our first post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Braulio Assis, joining us from Eric Riddell's lab at UNC Chapel Hill. Braulio will be leading on several different projects, including analysis of existing whole-genome methylation data and new in vitro experimental work. 
  • PhD student Shady Kuster has been collaborating with the Wilsterman Lab on mitonuclear function in deer mice for over a year now, but she officially joined the lab as a co-advised PhD student this past fall. She's currently in the thick of data collection, and we're excited to see what her hard work yields in the coming days!
• Lab Travel
  • Makenna and Kate both attended a host of summer conferences associated with the BIO-LEAPS award. We attended our first Mammalogy conference in Boulder, Colorado and Makenna's first Evolution conference in Montreal, Canada!
  • Chloe Butler presented at her first conference, Mammalogy, to a really enthusiastic crowd and discovered a new joy in presenting her results.
  • Meg Hemmerlein presented a poster on her on-going analysis of the early gestation placental transcriptome at Evolution.
  • Natalie Baez-Torres was voted "Best Presentation" by her peers within the summer 2024 BMB REU - this is the second REU student in a row who was selected for this prize ... lots of pressure for whomever joins the lab for summer 2025! ;)
  • Nearly the whole lab (including many undergraduates!) helped out with field work on Mount Blue Sky and in Nebraska in August and September. We were highly successful despite some bumps in Nebraska. Three cheers for new mice!
  • Makenna Juergens (PhD student), Chloe Butler (MS student), Natalie Baez-Torres ('24 REU student), and Kylie Jewett (CSU UGR) all presented posters at SICB 2025 in Atlanta, GA! Congrats all!!
  • Meg Hemmerlein and Kate Wilsterman traveled to Lake Louise, Alberta, CAN for the final International Hypoxia Symposia in Feb 2025, which was an awesome experience. Meg presented a poster, and Kate gave an invited talk.
• Publications
  • ​We put out two publications over the past 8 months!
    
    • Led by Anna Bautista with support from Ashley Larson and Chloe Butler, a book chapter on the endocrinology of gestation across mammals!
      
    • A writing project started back in 2019 when Kate was a post-doc, reviewing the physiological "toggles" the control litter size across mammals, and what remains to be discovered in this space. We finally got this across the finish line in a big group effort!
  • Both of these are available as reprints over on our Publications page!
• Lab Awards & Accomplishments
  • Kate Wilsterman was selected for the 2025 George A. Bartholomew award and had the opportunity to give an evening keynote talk at SICB. This was a true honor for Kate, who has been attending Bartholomew Award Lectures since she was and undergraduate, back in 2014!
  • Makenna Juergens won a SICB Grant-in-Aid-of-Research to support her on-going experiments investigating how parity influences parental care in deer mice.
  • Meg Hemmerlein won 2nd place among Trainee Posters at the International Hypoxia Symposia - amazing to get handed an award by a Nobel laureate!!
  • Kate Wilsterman won the Reeves Prize at the International Hypoxia Symposia, which recognizes "a speaker at the biannual Symposia who embodies Jack’s passion for excellence in science, communication and education." This really closely aligns with my own approach to training and education, and thus this is also an honor to have been selected for.
  • Finally, our lab received official word in May that we were awarded an R01 grant from NICHD! This grant will support a bunch of core research in the lab for the next 4 years. We have lots of exciting science coming your way through collaborations with the Sudmant Lab at UC Berkeley. While we cook up data and wait for animals to become pregnant, Meg has been traveling to UC Berkeley to perfect some of our single nuclei isolation procedures for the placenta.