Our latest work, led by Cal Floyd in the Dinner Group at University of Chicago, is featured on the cover of PNAS! This project was a multi-university collaboration that included computational modeling, cell biology, and engineering. Check out Saad’s excellent tweet thread on the paper here: .

The Elting Lab has been awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with the groups of Saad Bhamla (Georgia Tech), Fred Chang (UCSF), Scott Coyle (University of Wisconsin), Aaron Dinner (University of Chicago), Jerry Honts (Drake University), and Jane Maienschein (Marine Biological Laboratory and Arizona State University). This grant will allow us to take a multi-scale, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the ultrafast organismal scale contractions of the unicellular ciliate, Spirostomum, one of nature’s fastest cells! We’re thrilled to be able to continue our work with this highly interdisciplinary, collaborative (and all around fun!) team!

We were very excited to learn that Mary has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure (effective August 2023). Looking forward to the opportunity for many more years of science to come!

Marc, Mary, and Pengning Xu (from the Weninger Lab at NCSU Physics) celebrating at the University Commencement ceremony/i>

Marc Begley successfully defended his PhD in November and graduated on December 17. We are so happy for Marc and excited for his next adventure! After graduation, he plans to move to New Jersey and seek a position as a postdoctoral researcher.

The lab also celebrated the awarding of Mohamed Moshtohry’s posthumous PhD at graduation, too. We sorely missed celebrating with Mohamed in person but are glad that his family could receive this degree and hope that it brings them some comfort.

The Elting Lab has several currently open positions.

We are recruiting NCSU undergraduates for positions beginning in the Summer of 2022 (with the potential to continue into the school year). For full consideration for these paid positions, interested students should contact Dr. Elting by April 18. See instructions on the Join tab.

We are also recruiting one or more postdoctoral scholars to work on the mechanics of the mitotic spindle. Applicants should apply by April 18 to ensure full consideration, though applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled. See more details on the Join tab.

Mohamed and Kim’s paper on mechanical perturbation of the cytokinetic ring by laser ablation, which is a collaboration of our group with the Laplante group (also in the QCDB cluster at NCSU) is now published. See the publications tab for more info!

Several papers from the group were recently accepted, including Ana Sofia’s first author paper at the Journal of Microscopy (with contributions from lab member Parsa, too, and collaboration with Lex Kemper and Jamie Jennings), Marc’s first author paper at Molecular Biology of the Cell (with contributions from lab members Grant and Elizabeth, and a collaboration with the Ohi group), and two first author papers from Parsa! Check them out on the publications tab.

Leeba Ann Chacko selected Parsa’s preprint (posted on bioRxiv) to highlight with a preLight post. We really appreciate the feedback from Leeba, who raises some great questions that we hope to investigate in future work. We also appreciated the chance to respond to some of her questions, and you can read our response at the bottom of the preLight.

Side note that in addition to her science, Leeba also makes some amazing science art, which you can check out on her twitter. Look at this adorable pombe (with bonus points for the pun):

I’ve been missing my Pombe buddies since it’s been some time since I’ve been to the lab. Here’s fission (heading) east. #Pombeart #SorryNotSorry pic.twitter.com/Ix8n1sdWoH

— Leeba Ann Chacko (@LeebaAnnChacko) June 28, 2021