News

Two of our current graduate students, Jesna Varghese and Niloy Kumar Das, formally advanced to PhD candidacy after passing their respective qualifying exams in the past year. Jesna passed her exam on September 18, 2024, and Niloy passed his on August 20, 2025. Congratulations you two!

We were pleased to learn that Cabeen lab undergraduate Adriahna Blackburn was selected in the national competition for a Barry Goldwater Scholarship. This is a very competitive and prestigious honor bestowed on the most promising STEM undergraduates in the country. Congratulations, Adriahna! Read more at https://news.okstate.edu/articles/communications/2025/osus_three_new_goldwater_scholars_lead_state_institutions.html!

Cabeen lab undergraduate Olivia Morgan took second prize among outstanding undergraduate posters at the ASM Missouri Valley Branch Meeting held at OSU on March 21-22, 2025. The meeting also saw Cabeen lab postdoc Rabi Khadka give one of the four 30-minute Branch talks and PhD student Yashi Batra give a talk (plus 7 other presentations!). Congratulations to Olivia and to all our presenters.

Dr. Rabindra (Rabi) Khadka's thesis work showing that 1) stressosome-mediated environmental stress sensing is robust but tunable via mutation and 2) environmental stress sensing can also occur in the absence of a stressosome (but depending on RsbT) is now in press at Nature Communications.  Congratulations to Rabi and Niloy plus Rabi's former undergraduate mentees Brannon, Natalie, Mitchell, and Andy for this paradigm-shifting work! https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56871-1

PhD candidate Rabindra (Rabi) Khadka successfully defended his PhD thesis on July 15, 2024. Congratulations Dr. Khadka! Dr. Khadka is the last of the "OG Crew" in the Cabeen lab and is seeking a position in industry. His thesis was about the mechanistic basis for environmental stress sensing in Bacillus subtilis. The whole crew will miss him when he leaves us.

PhD candidate Somalisa Pan successfully defended her PhD thesis on April 3, 2024. Congratulations Dr. Pan! Dr. Pan is moving on in July 2024 to a postdoctoral position in Chicago. Her thesis covered a lot of ground in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, ranging from biofilm formation to glycerol metabolism. We will miss her and wish her the best of luck!  

Undergraduate and Beckman Research Scholar Adriahna Blackburn took hope first prize for undergraduate posters at the recent ASM Missouri Valley Branch Regional Meeting held at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. She presented work about a repressor called PrtR that is involved in pyocin regulation in P. aeruginosa. This was her first poster presentation at a regional meeting, and we're so proud of her excellent performance right out of the gate!

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=408766385308527&set=a.116805237837978

Senior PhD student Somalisa Pan and former postdoc Simon Underhill have teamed up yet again to publish work in collaboration with the Manjarrez Lab at OSU-CHS to showcase some of the biofilm and virulence phenotypes of strains that are mutant for glycerol and glucose utilization. From the Cabeen lab, former PhD student Chris Hamm and former undergraduate Dax Butler are also contributors. The paper is available in ASM's open-access mSphere journal at https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00786-23. Congratulations to all the authors!

Former undergraduate Sid Bush is the lead author on primarily undergraduate research from the lab—a collaboration among 8 current and former undergraduates and former grad student Chris Hamm. This team did a huge amount of work over the years to show that different strains of B. subtilis with different complements of RsbR paralogs in the stressosome display differing fitness in co-culture under different stress conditions. A primary finding of the paper is that RsbRA-only cells, whose sigma-B response resembles the wild type, outcompete other single-RsbR strains under ethanol stress but have a fitness deficit under NaCl stress, while the opposite is true of RsbRD-only cells. The paper is available in ASM's open-access mSphere journal at https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00719-23. An image from their paper also made the cover for that issue of mSphere! Congratulations to Sid, Shelby, Nick, Chris, Madeline, Sarah, Emily, AnaLisa, Nick, and Jake!