Neil Macpherson

Undergraduate Poster Session 2019

This Friday, April 5th, CSB held our annual Undergraduate Poster Session with posters from 42 students. They prepared posters and answered tough questions on the experimental work they undertook in our research laboratories over the year. Their dedication and hard work was abundantly evident in the quality of their posters. Thank you to all the students who devoted their time, their intellect and their dexterity to these informative projects. We also appreciate the guidance of the supervisors and grad students who aided them along the way.
As part of the poster competition, students competed for the F Michael Barrett Award. The winners this year were Elina Kadriu (Christendat Lab), Matthew DeLuca (Mitchell Lab), Zana Nastic (Godt Lab), Victoria Shelton (Moses Lab), Clare Breit-McNally (Guttman Lab), Chengyin Li (Saltzman Lab), Anastasia Liu (Currie Lab), Patrick Ly (Christendat Lab) and Aaryn Montgomery Song (Gilbert Lab).

The award is named for Michael Barrett, a professor (now retired) who taught over 500 undergraduate students per year and administered some of our larger courses with great care and concern for our students. Over the years, he was involved in course design and curriculum development within the department and across campus.
We would like to thank our judges for making the difficult choice between these excellent posters.
Our thanks and appreciation go to Undergraduate Office staff Janet Mannone and Genna Zunde for planning the day, organizing the event and ensuring plenty of refreshments and food were available.

by Neil Macpherson

Congratulations to Professor Melanie Woodin on her appointment as Dean of Arts & Science

It is our sincere pleasure to congratulate Professor Melanie Woodin on her appointment as the new Dean for the Faculty of Arts & Science. Melanie will begin her 5-year term as Dean on July 1, 2019.

In CSB, we have benefited, and continue to benefit, from Professor Woodin's leadership and excellence in research, graduate mentoring and training, undergraduate teaching, and service in many dimensions. In the last few years, she has made outstanding contributions to administration in the Dean's office and will now have the opportunity to exercise her strong leadership and vision for the faculty going forward.

You can read more about her neuroscience research in Cell & Systems Biology and her plans for the faculty in this UofT News article.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Woodin on this wonderful accomplishment.

by Neil Macpherson

Congratulations to Professor Nick Provart on his recent Genome Canada grant!

Congratulations to Professor Nick Provart, who has received Genome Canada funding for his team’s grant "From ePlants to eEcosystems: New Frameworks and Tools for Sharing, Accessing, Exploring and Integrating ‘Omic Data from Plants" as part of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (B/CB) Competition.

This award was also featured in a UofT News article on the Arts & Science Website.

The original ePlant system, developed as part of a previous Genome Canada effort, integrates many data types but was not configured for phenotype data. Amongst its many applications, phenotype data provide important information on traits of interest to plant breeders and foresters.

This grant provides funding for a new module to integrate the wide variety of data available, including ecosystem data, phenotypes and genotypes into ePlant. This will be done for the already existing ePlant species and any new ePlant species to be developed as part of this project. The researchers will also open the ePlant system to the research community to build a larger ePlant ecosystem of information. This online system will act as a resource where plant biologists will be able to share their datasets.

Ultimately, these tools can help to accelerate the task of identifying useful genes to feed, shelter and power a world of nine billion people by the year 2050.

by Neil Macpherson