Former Cabeen lab undergrad and now Accelerated Master's student William Colton is a founder of a young company, Paldara Pharmaceuticals, that has recently won seed funding to advance its research and development. Paldara is operating out of a private laboratory in Stillwater. Great work William!

OSU article at https://news.okstate.edu/articles/business/2020/osu-i-corps-teams-receives-grants-from-national-science-foundation.html

The Cabeen lab has won a MIRA (R35) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to support research in the lab for the next five years. We are grateful to the students who generated great preliminary data, mentors who offered critical feedback, colleagues who offered encouragement, and reviewers who carefully evaluated our proposal. Now to get to work making discoveries!

We are proud to announce that one of our undergraduate researchers, Sid Bush, received a Niblack Research Scholarship for 2020-2021. Sid was also a Wentz Scholar, making him the first student from the lab to have won both of these prestigious research awards. Sid hopes after graduation to have a career in science industry.

Two undergraduate Wentz Research Scholars will join the Cabeen Crew for the 2020-2021 school year. Eliza Kent developed her own research project to examine how micropatterned surfaces affect bacterial growth on those surfaces. Bryn Goldsmith developed her own project about the effectiveness of charcoal-containing toothpaste for whitening and protection against tooth decay. We look forward to their work with us!

Adam Bronson was accepted into a summer research program at the UCSF, and Nina Baggett was accepted into a program at UT-Southwestern. Both of these institutions are research powerhouses, and we are proud to have students participating in these highly competitive programs. Unfortunately these programs were canceled for this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we are nonetheless proud that they WOULD have been there!

CAS Student Council is pleased to announce Matthew Cabeen as the CAS Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award recipient for 2019-20! Winners of this award are nominated by students and then selected by a student committee.

We are pleased to announce that the Cabeen Lab is now NIH-funded as one of 5 inaugural labs in a new CoBRE, the Oklahoma Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunity, centered at the Oklahoma Unversity Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and headed by Dr. Jimmy Ballard. The shared 5-year, $11M grant will support research on Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm signaling in the lab. The Wozniak Lab is also one of the inaugural labs, and with this grant more than half of MMG faculty--everyone who works on projects somehow related to health--are NIH funded. Read the press release about the grant here.

Chris Hamm and Amal Yahya both gave oral presentations at the OSU Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Symposium. Chris took first place in the competition, and Amal took third. They are making the lab proud and inspiring others!