Polly Fordyce was recently named a 2017 Scialog Fellow for Molecules Come to Life. It is a two-year program jointly sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Congratulations, Polly!
Bianca Cruz joins the lab for the summer!
Bianca Cruz is an undergraduate at Cal Poly Pomona studying Physics. She work in a photonics lab at Cal Poly which develops fiber-optic biosensors aimed for clinical applications.
Polly, Kara & Craig attend the GRC Microfluidic Conference in Italy
Graduate Student Kara Brower, Postdoctoral Fellow Craig Markin, and Polly Fordyce attended the Gordon Research Microfluidics Conference in Barga, Italy!
Craig and Kara presented posters at the meeting on their work, and Kara was awarded best poster!
Congratulations!
Kara's paper describing an open-source pneumatics build for microfluidic control is posted on bioRXiv!
Kara's manuscript provides detailed parts lists, freely downloadable design files, and exhaustive step-by-step instructions (literally hundreds of photos!) for building an open-source pneumatics setup to control multi-layer microfluidic devices. You can find it all here:
http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/13/173468
Congratulations, Kara!
Kara earns a Centennial Teaching Award!
In recognition for her hard work and dedication to developing the new BIOE 301D hands-on microfluidics course described below, Kara just received a Centennial Teaching Award. Many congratulations, Kara!!!
Polly's course covered in Stanford Alumni Magazine!
Stanford Alumni Magazine published a piece on Polly's BioE 301D course where students create microfluidic devices with real-world applications.
Read the full story here.
Polly profiled for Stanford Medicine News
Stanford Medicine News Center published a profile on Polly and the lab's research!
Read "The beadnik: Polly Fordyce uses something tiny to do something big" here.
Alli Keys joins the lab!
Welcome to Alli Keys, who has joined the Fordyce Lab as a ChEM-H Undergraduate Scholar!
Alli Keys is a sophomore from Houston, Texas, majoring in Chemistry. She previously worked as a Research Assistant at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Her hobbies include singing with the University Singers Choir, teaching Introductory Chemistry, and participating in the Stanford Axe Committee.
Polly is named a 2017 Sloan Fellow!
Polly has been awarded a 2017 Sloan Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation! You can read more about the Fellowship and the other awardees from Stanford here.
Polly is named a Chan Zuckerberg Investigator!
Alex Sockell joins the lab!
We are very happy to announce that Alex Sockell has decided to join the lab! Alex is a graduate student in Genetics and deep sequencing guru who previously worked as a researcher and lab manager in the Bustamante lab for 3 years. Welcome, Alex!
Film crew visits the lab for our upcoming JoVE article!
Lights, camera, complex photolithography fabrication. A film crew from JoVE came to the lab and clean room to capture Kara and Adam in action making multilayer molding masters and valved microfluidic devices for producing droplet emulsions. Some outtakes below:
Tyler officially becomes a PhD candidate!
Tyler passed his quals with flying colors and is now officially a PhD candidate in Genetics. Congratulations, Tyler!!!!
Our new paper describing spectrally encoded beads with > 1,000 codes is out!
Our new paper describing MRBLEs (Microspheres with Ratiometric Barcode Lanthanide Encoding) containing > 1,000 different uniquely identifiable spectral codes is now out in Advanced Optical Materials. Check it out here. Congratulations to Huy and Kara for their fantastic work!
The Fordyce Lab is awarded an NIH New Innovator Award!
The Fordyce Lab is awarded 2 Bio-X Seed Grants!
The Fordyce Lab has been awarded seed funding from Bio-X to support two projects in the lab!
The first grant, "High-throughput Quantitative Enzymology: Developing and Deploying a Novel Microfluidic Platform", funds a collaborative project with Dan Herschlag's lab in the Department of Biochemistry that is being driven by Craig Markin, a joint postdoc between our labs. The goal of this project is to develop a new microfluidic technology for producing and measuring Michaelis-Menten kinetics for thousands of rationally chosen enzyme mutants in parallel. By making these measurements, we hope to learn more about how enzymes position active site residues for catalysis and improve efforts to design new enzymes.
The second grant, "Deciphering the Language of Cellular Protein Interaction Networks Using Spectrally Encoded Peptide-Bead Libraries", funds a collaborative project with Martha Cyert's lab in the Department of Biology that is being led by Huy Nguyen. For this project, we are developing a new bead-based technology for studying how calcineurin, a human phosphatase that is the target of several immunosuppressant drugs, finds and binds its protein substrates in the cell. With these measurements, we hope to improve prediction of calcineurin substrates and deepen our knowledge of cell signaling networks in vivo.
For more information on these projects (and to see the awesome science of the other funded grants!), check out the Bio-X website.
Welcome Huy Quoc Nguyen and congratulations!
Postdoctoral scholar Huy Quoc Nguyen has joined the Fordyce Lab! Huy graduated with a PhD in Chemistry from UC Davis and a BS from University of Washington.
Huy was just awarded a ChEM-H seed grant with Christian Lentz from Matt Bogyo's lab to develop a new assay for protease specificity on spectrally encoded beads. Congratulations!
Welcome Rebecca, Varun, and Alex!
We have three new students in the Fordyce Lab for the summer! Rebecca Bromley-Dulfano is an undergraduate from the Physics department. Alex Sockell is a rotation student with the Genetics Department. Varun Venkatesh is a high school student joining us as an intern.
Welcome!
Craig is awarded a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship!
Craig Markin was awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, which carries up to five years of full support! Read more about the fellowship here.
Craig works jointly between our laboratory and the Herschlag laboratory to develop new microfluidic techniques for quantitatively measuring enzyme activity and catalysis across thousands of mutants in a single assay.
Congratulations, Craig!
Adam White is awarded a Stanford Dean's Postdoctoral Fellowship!
Adam was recently awarded a Stanford Dean's Postdoctoral Fellowship to fund his proposal detailing developing novel assays based on using spectrally encoded beads for biological multiplexing. Congratulations, Adam!!