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Fall/Winter 2024

2/24/2025

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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.

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Summ 2024

5/27/2024

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New Lab Members!
- This summer we are excited to be hosting Natalie Baez Torres, from Universidad Ana G. Mendez, as part of the CSU BMB REU program - welcome Natalie!
Lab Travel
- The lab attended the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Conference in January! It was super fun to have a critical mass at the conference. Pics below!
Lab Awards & Accomplishments
- In collaboration with Richelle Tanner at Chapman University, Kate Wilsterman was awarded an NSF BIO-LEAPS award to work with scientific societies to help address and improve their organizational conference. Makenna Juergens will be participating as a graduate student researcher on this project. Look out for our table at Mammalogy and Evolution this summer!
- Meg Hemmerlein won the Ray Huey award for Best Student Poster at the SICB meeting - this is a significant accomplishment, especially for a second-year graduate student. We're proud of you Meg!
- Makenna Juergens was awarded an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship competition - super impressive! Awesome job, Makenna!
- Hannah Butkus was awarded Highest Honors, a University-level award, for her undergraduate thesis presentation at CSU's Celebration of Undergraduate Research Conference (CURC) this Spring. Hannah was mentored closely by Anna Bautista.
- Anna Bautista's time in the lab is coming to a close, but she was accepted into Neuroscience PhD programs at both Princeton and Emory University! Anna ultimately chose Emory - we're excited to watch your successes Anna, and hopefully we'll see you in Atlanta for SICB 2025!
- Kate Wilsterman was selected as a Boettcher Foundation Webb-Waring Early Career Investigator awardee. This award brings both money to the lab to continue our research and it connects the lab with a broader set of Colorado-based researchers and biotechnologies folks. Woohoo!

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Fall/Winter 2023 - WOW! Lots happening!

12/14/2023

New Lab Members!
- PhD student Makenna Juergens has officially started and is forging exciting new directions into metabolic physiology and maternal investment underlying population differences in reproductive outcomes! Exciting things to come over the next 5 years!
- We have two new undergraduates, Kendall Foreman and Madison Gosney (a McNair Scholar), who are getting busy with our backlog of histology quantification (more on that in the Spring semester!
Lab Awards & Accomplishments
- The Wilsterman Lab completed their first field season! Woohoo!
- Meg Hemmerlein successfully pioneered sequence data generation for an IsoSeq dataset and a single-nuclei RNA/ATAC-seq data from our deer mouse placentas. Meg now has more than enough data for her thesis - lots of analyses are coming down the pipeline ... (haha ... get it?)
- Makenna Juergens won "Best First Year" at the CSU-wide GradShow competition for her poster on independent undergraduate research. A strong first-semester showing, Makenna!
- Meg Hemmerlein, Makenna Juergens, and Anna Bautista wrote and submitted GRFP applications this fall. Congrats all! It was an intense process but they produced three really competitive applications. Now we just keep our fingers crosses.
- Funding is starting to trickle in to the lab ... stay tuned for our new directions and project plans!

Summ 2023

8/15/2023

New Lab Members!
- We have one new undergraduate, Lizzie Brisnehan, who is working closely with Ashley Larson to quantify cell growth in two recently-completed hypoxia experiments. Welcome, Lizzie!
Lab Awards & Accomplishments
- REU student Kai Brantley's summer project was voted "Best Poster" at the Final Research Symposium! Kai investigated how adaptation to hypoxia at high elevations has remodeled placental development by quantifying expansion and shape of maternal and fetal blood spaces in deer mouse labyrinth zones. Kai is finishing their undergraduate education at Fort Lewis College this fall, but we're looking forward to tying up some loose ends on this project for publication in 2024!
- PhD student Meg Hemmerlein was awarded an NIH T32 fellowship through the qCMB program here at CSU. Congrats Meg!
- MS student Chloe Butler completed all of her sample collection for her MS thesis project - phew! Just data analysis and writing to go now ...
Publications
- Our first manuscript, "Adaptive structural and functional evolution of the placenta protects fetal growth in high-elevation deer mice" is now published! Check it out here.

Spr 2023 - Lots of excitement and growth in the lab this spring!

5/1/2023

New Lab Members!
- The lab welcomed three new graduate students this spring:
  - MS student, Chloe Butler, all the way from Texas
  - PhD student, Meg Hemmerlein (a former CMB rotation student)
  - PhD student (starting Fall 2023), Makenna Juergens from Ohio
- The lab is hosting two summer undergraduates - Kai Brantley from Fort Lewis College, and Maxine Gore from the Front Range Community College. We're all looking forward to lots of research over the summer!
Lab Awards & Accomplishments
- Undergraduate Mya Voigtsberger was awarded the "Rising Star" award at the MURALS undergraduate research conference at CSU. Mya's presentation on splenic remodeling and interactions between pregnancy and hypoxia in deer mice came in 4th out of over 80 presentations. Mya is graduating this spring - we're so proud of you Mya!
Publications
- Our bioRxiv preprint on placental adaptations to hypoxia in deer mice is now accepted and in press! Stay tuned!

Fall/Winter 2024

Summ 2024

Fall/Winter 2023 - WOW! Lots happening!

Summ 2023

Spr 2023 - Lots of excitement and growth in the lab this spring!

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