UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT DEPARTMENT OF MICROBIOLOGY AND MOLECULAR GENETICS

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1 UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT DEPARTMENT OF MICROBIOLOGY AND MOLECULAR GENETICS MMG NEWS SUMMER/FALL 2016 Class of was an outstanding year for graduating seniors in MMG. The class had 28 graduates our largest ever and 46% were Vermonters. There were nine Microbiology majors and eight Molecular Genetics majors, six Microbiology / Molecular Genetics double majors and five other students with double majors, one in our Department and one in another department. Eight were Honors College graduates, and 96% of the graduates did undergraduate research. As of this writing, seventeen of these students were employed in a variety of positions, six were accepted into MS or PhD graduate programs, one is pursuing a MD at UVM, one is attending dental school, another is training to become an Emergency Medical Technician, and one is traveling the U.S. rock climbing!. In Memoriam Mary Wilk passed away shortly after graduation. Mary was an amazing, bubbly young woman at UVM. She was an AdvoCAT, a leader in Outing Club & TREK, a DREAM mentor and passionate about public health. Mary will be sorely missed by MMG, the UVM community and the Class of Past Classes Several MMGers received advanced degrees over the last year. Kelsey Preston (2012), Katelyn Shea (2009) and Matthew LeComte Ph.D. (2004) were conferred with their Doctor of Medicine degrees from UVM. Brandon Vanesse (2012) earned his DMD from Boston College. From UVM Melissa Carabeau (2013) received her MS in Food Systems and Megan Resnick (2012) earned her MPH. We currently have 4 alumni enrolled in UVM s MPH program, two more are members of UVM s medical school Class of 2020 and one alum just started her PhD in UVM s CMB program. Since 2000 our 210 alumni have earned 29 PhD, 31 MD/DO, 2 MD/PhD, 3 DMD, 2 DVM, 4 JD and 47 various MS degrees! WOW we have some incredible alumni!! Welcome New Undergraduates! Matt Bompastore Emily Brady Lara Cushman Ruth Doe* Rebecca Grant Tony Aquilla EJ Hazelton* Emma Hintz Katarina Ko Jarrod Mayer Morgan McCord Sarah Powers Vermont Resident Microbiology Molecular Genetics Steven Hepp* Malcolm Hughes Hannah Lukes Addie Luperchio Chris Nuckols* Nikki Samuelson Laurel Sherlock* Victoria Standard Joe Walzer Katrina Wells Kelly Witzl Devyn Yolda Carr The undergraduate program has been growing steadily and we currently have 144 majors! MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 1

2 Awards Michael Barnum (2016) received the F.T. Kidder Medal. This University award is given to the senior man at UVM ranking first in character, leadership and scholarship. Lauren Donnelly (2016) received the Lawrence K. Forcier Outstanding Senior Award. This award is given to the top CALS graduating senior who has demonstrated academic excellence and outstanding service. Niles Trigg (2017) received the Alexander Kende Academic Merit Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. This award recognizes a junior in CALS for academic excellence, interest in bio-medical research and service. Lauren Donnelly (2016) and Michael Barnum (2016) received the Warren R. Steinbring Outstanding Senior in Microbiology Award, which is given in recognition of academic excellence and professional growth. Katie Bashant (2016) and Ellen Seyller (2016) received the Lucille P. Markey Outstanding Senior in Molecular Genetics Award, which is given in recognition of academic excellence and professional growth. Ellen Seyller (2016), Connor Klopfer (2016) and Ethan Rogers (2017) were the recipients of the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award. Ellen, Connor and Ethan exhibited excellence in the classroom as undergraduate teaching assistants. Sarah Perlee (2017) who majors in Microbiology and minors in Molecular Genetics, received the Nicole J. Ferland Award. This award supports her summer research in the Thali Lab. Katelyn Roberts (2017) & Joshua Laffin (2018) each received a Distinguished Undergraduate Summer Research Award to support their research with Sean Diehl (Katelyn) and Mercedes Rincon (Josh). Many thanks to the alumna & parents of alumni who generously gave money to support the Ferland & DUSRA awards! MMG had eight Distinguished Undergraduate Research (DUR) recipients. The Distinguished Undergraduate Research Program of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences recognizes students who, in addition to pursuing their regular course of study, conduct original research under the immediate supervision of a faculty member. Five of the eight DUR recipients were also Honors College Scholars and an additional three students also received Honors College Scholar recognition. Michael Barnum, DUR + Honors College Scholar Microbiology Thyroid Hormone Receptor ß (TRß) Regulation of Runt-Related Transcription Factor 2 (Runx2) in Thyroid Tumorigenesis. Mentor: Frances Carr, Ph.D. Katie Bashant, DUR + Honors College Scholar Microbiology & Molecular Genetics - Caspase inhibition of dendritic cells promotes cell death but enhances activation of Υδ T cells. Mentor: Ralph Budd, M.D. Lauren Bellfy, DUR + Honors College Scholar Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Creating a Synthetic Lymph Node for HIV-1 Investigations using 3D Hydrogels. Mentor: Markus Thali, Ph.D. Lauren Donnelly, DUR + Honors College Scholar Microbiology - Characterization of Clostridium difficile spores lacking either SpoVAC or DPA Synthetase. Mentor: Aimee Shen, Ph.D. Liam Kelley, DUR + Honors College Scholar Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 2

3 Investigation of Effects of Post- Translational Modifications to SMIM1 on Its Role as the Vel Blood Group System Antigen. Mentor: Brian Ballif, Ph.D. Audria Greenwald, DUR Animal and Veterinary Sciences & Microbiology Analysis of Extreme Microbiome Samples and Microbial Reference Standard using Oxford Nanopore MinION Sanger Sequencing Technologies. Mentor: Scott Tighe, Ph.D. Connor Klopfer, DUR Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Interactions of the EhMSP-1 cytoplasmic tail with cytoskeleton filamentous actin in Entamoeba histolytica. Mentor: Chris Huston, M.D. Priyanka Ravichandran, DUR Microbiology Determining if the Interaction Between the Clostridium difficile Spore Morphogenetic Proteins SipL and SpolIVA is Necessary for Proper Spore Coat Formation and Localization. Mentor: Aimee Shen, Ph.D. Colleen Cataldo, Honors College Scholar Molecular Genetics Epidemiology of Staphylococci Isolated from Artisan Cheese Dairy Farms in Vermont: Evidence of hostspecificity among strain types. Mentor: John Barlow, Ph.D. Ellen Seyller, Honors College Scholar Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Sex differences in accelerated habit formation in methamphetamine-sensitized rats. Mentor: Donna Toufexis, Ph.D. Hannah Shulman, Honors College Scholar Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Angiogenic Interactions between ThreonyltRNA Synthetase and the Endothelial Extracellular Matrix. Mentor: Karen Lounsbury, Ph.D. Congratulations to all our award winners! LAB NEWS MBSR Molecular Bioinformatics Shared Resource News It has been a busy year for the Bioinformatics Shared Resource, working on over 40 projects just since June. Julie Dragon, taking over as the new Director from Jeff Bond, has been overseeing a reboot of the group, with a new name (BSR), a forthcoming new logo, and some new resources. Julie was promoted to Assistant Professor shortly after becoming Director. Dave Shirley (previously in the Shen and Wargo labs) was hired at 100% FTE in July as Bob Devins was winding down to retirement. Marni Slavik and Ramiro Barrantes remain in longstanding variable effort part time roles, and Jeff Bond is currently subcontracted out at 100% effort on a phase II clinical trial for molecularly guided therapeutics for pediatric cancer treatment. Bob retired in January after 3 years at the BSR; previously he had worked for UVM s VACC and IBM, so when he came to the BSR he brought considerable experience of high performance computing. During his time at the BSR he developed an invaluable scheduling system for running parallelized bioinformatics workflows on the VACC. Bob s expertise and dry sense of humor will be missed, although how much he misses the BSR remains to be seen he is currently sailing around the Virgin Islands! BSR retreat at Marni s camp on Lake Champlain last Fall (NOT Virgin Islands!). Left to Right: Dave, Julie, Ramiro, Marni, Bob MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 3

4 Dave brings additional biostatistics and metagenomics experience to the group. He has set up a QIIME 16S pipeline for identification of bacterial community composition, and is working on a metagenomic pipeline. In collaboration with the Stein group he has also set up a Hi-C pipeline for identification of chromosomal interactions. The BSR has done well with support from grants this year, submitting the Wallace P01 renewal, a new Cancer COBRE application (Translational Cancer Research with Jane Lian and Marc Greenblatt), and the Phase 3 renewal of the VCIID COBRE. In addition, we were successful on an R01 application with Gary Stein and Jane Lian, and in the U01 application with Janet Stein, Don Weaver, and Brian Sprague (the VT Breast Cancer Molecular Characterization Lab). Julie has taken over teaching courses in bioinformatics, and for the Spring 2016 semester is teaching a completely redesigned MMG232, with lectures also from Dave Shirley, Dawei Li, Ramiro Barrantes and Jeff Bond. Enrollment stands at 13 students, including 4 graduate students. The BSR is evaluating the level of interest in bioinformatics/data analysis workshops for faculty and graduate students. If this would be of interest to you or your lab, please stop by or Julie or Dave to let us know. Doublié Lab Lots of exciting changes have been happening in the Doublié Lab for the past 18 months. Ash Prakash has recently left us and joined the faculty at the University of South Alabama. She has started her own lab at the Mitchell Cancer Institute studying DNA repair in the mitochondria. Ash was super busy before she left, she presented her work at a conference in Spain and is also organizing a Gordon Research Seminar this June. On top of this, she has two papers ready to go. Meanwhile, outside of lab, Ash traveled with her mother to watch tennis matches in Wimbledon and the US. Before Karl Zahn left us he presented his work at conferences in Maine and the UK and also, published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. He started as a post-doc in the Greenberg lab at the University of Pennsylvania in June of We wish them the best of luck in all of their new endeavors and lots of sunshine down south! Brittany Carroll officially joined our lab in the summer of 2015 but, this time, as a CMB graduate student. She has purchased herself a new Honda Civic to cart her doggie, Tucker, around. Andrew Malaby and his wife bought their first home here in VT. Despite his busy lab schedule, Andrew was able to train and finish the VT City Marathon. Kedar Moharana got married in India last June. His wife lives in the Netherlands but she has been to the US for a couple of visits! He also got to spend Christmas in the Netherlands with her! Brian Eckenroth has been busy doing renovations to his new house and picking out paint colors. Since he is our beamline scientist and X-ray guru he also attended a small angle X-ray scattering workshop in Chicago. Vy Cao is busy studying for the MCATs and her daughter has started her first year of preschool. And now for some alumni news! Zeke, our former high school student helper, enrolled at Harvard University after taking a year off to be an au-pair in France. Marcus Moreno, who graduated from UVM in 2015 with a B.S in Biochemistry, has now started graduate MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 4

5 school at UC Davis. And Sylvie recently got a surprise visit from Doug Renfrew, a Molecular Genetics major who graduated in 2003 and one of Sylvie s first undergrads. He is now in NY City and has a cool job working on computational protein design. and some surprises, so that s a perfect experience! Li Lab Dr. Xun Chen, joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Associate in October Dawei, Xun, and Ph.D. student Arvis Sulovari attended the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting in Baltimore last October. They presented a poster and enjoyed all the interesting talks throughout the week, as well as the meetings with journal editors, leaders in the field and peers from around the world. Arvis was invited to give a TEDx talk, held at UVM, where he talked about the work that we are doing in our lab. He was the only graduate student from UVM who was invited to give a talk. Guangchen Liu joined the Li lab as a visiting graduate student, and was here from October 2014 until April He and his family visited Disney World in Orlando Florida a couple of months ago, that s a great place for family, especially for kids. They spent four days visiting four parks. In Disney s Animal Kingdom, They saw all kinds of animals from the world, and the famous tree of life, which is the icon of this park. Then in Epcot Park, they experienced the magic space travel in Spaceship Earth and the fireworks performances. In Disney s Hollywood Studios, the Fantasmic, including the water screen film and fireworks, are so impressive. The most interesting park is the Magic Kingdom Park, They experienced the exciting roller coaster, Tomorrowland Speedway, Buzz lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, and the most important is the Cinderella Castle, just like entering cartoon world. They felt pretty tired during the visiting days, but had lots of fun Two volunteers joined the Li lab this past year. David Miserak joined as a full-time volunteer software engineer. David is working on developing a tool to visualize viral DNA on the human genome. Outside of the lab, David tried out new pizza crust recipes recently. Jason Kost joined the lab as a full-time volunteer computational geneticist. Kost obtained his M.S. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Jason is working on analyzing genomic deep sequencing analysis in the lab. Mintz Lab It is with mixed emotions that three members of the Mintz lab have elected to leave the laboratory to pursue greater aspirations. Kenneth Patrick Smith (aka KP) successfully defended his PhD dissertation and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. James Kirby in the Department of Pathology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston MA, where he is pursuing the discovery of novel antimicrobials using high through put screening technologies. Yan Xing successfully defended his Master s thesis and is presently in his hometown of Jilin City in the Jilin Province of China. Richard Voogt successfully completed his Master s thesis in clinical and translational sciences and has returned to his MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 5

6 hometown of London, England to help care for his ailing mother. In London, he is also developing his own dance business, Dsantos Dance UK, where he instructs students on the dance forms of Salsa, Kizomba, and Bachata. In lieu of these departures, we welcomed David Danforth as a formal member of the laboratory. David received his Master s degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We also welcome three undergraduate students to the lab: Ellie Fortner-Buczala (MMG), Jake Tristano (MMG), and Lou Weng Lam (CAS). Thomas Freeman has been accepted into the secondary education program at UVM, where he is working on his Master's degree in teaching with a focus on teaching chemistry at the high school level. He intends to become a full-time student in the fall. Thomas also announced his engagement to his sweetheart Monique Choi after being together for a year. A summer wedding is planned. Lastly, Keith Mintz was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Pederson Lab The Pederson lab continues to break ground in our understanding of chromatin function. David has been sequestered in his office writing grants and manuscripts. Wendy Cannan is finishing up her last manuscript as a graduate student, preparing for her defense and pondering her next move. Changjiang (CJ) Yu has completed work for his Master's degree, is working on his thesis and has taken on some coursework in computer science and the City University of New York. Robyn Maher is working on several projects and manuscripts including an exciting collaboration with Carolyn Marsden and Joann Sweasy. Joyce Heckman is a reliable lab meeting participant and editor of manuscripts, abstracts and anything else you throw at her. Most importantly she maintains several candy jars in her office such that we are frequently visited by many in the department. In alumni news: Wenge Zhu was promoted to Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at George Washington University. The Pederson lab members with a few of their favorite things. Shen Lab Kelly Fimlaid welcomed her son, Gavin, to the world in January 2015 and then published two first author papers in PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens, identifying novel regulators of C. difficile spore formation and germination, respectively. She successfully defended her Ph.D. in September 2015 and will be starting her postdoc at Tufts Medical School with Joan Mecsas in the spring of The lab bid farewell to Keyan Pishdadian, MMG 13 and technician, who left in early 2015 to join Venmo, a subsidiary of Paypal, as a software engineer. Keyan loves coding and is enjoying his new career! The lab welcomed a new technician, Yuzo Kevorkian, MMG 14 and former undergraduate researcher in Dr. Matthew Wargo s lab. Yuzo published a first author paper with Dave Shirley, a bioinformaticist shared between Dr. Wargo and Dr. Shen s lab, in Biochimie in Yuzo presented this work at the 9 th International ClostPath meeting in Freiburg, Germany in Dave has since joined the Vermont Center for Advanced Genome Technologies and is currently involved in numerous projects around the university. MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 6

7 Kristin Schutz continues to be our lab manager and technician extraordinaire, pouring up to seventeen sleeves of agar plates comprising ten different media types in a single day (see picture). member in the lab. John was recently selected to join the 2016 ASM Undergraduate Research Capstone Program, which provides him with funding to attend the Capstone Institute and ASM Microbe Meeting in Boston, MA. Priyanka Ravichandran, an MMG senior, was awarded an Undergraduate Summer Research Award in 2015 and successfully defended her Distinguished Undergraduate Research Thesis this past March. Priyanka will be working towards a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University in fall 2016 with a concentration in Infectious Disease. Lauren Donnelly, another MMG senior, was awarded the Nicole J. Ferland Award to perform summer research in This research culminated in a first author manuscript that was recently accepted at the Journal of Bacteriology and represents a rare instance in which an undergraduate successfully publishes their thesis work prior to defending it! She presented this work at the Dartmouth Microbial Pathogenesis Retreat (see picture) and also present this research at the European Spores Conference in London in April 2016, with support from several university grants. Lauren was also recently awarded the Lawrence J. Forcier Outstanding Senior Award by CALS in recognition of her academic achievements and service to the university. She will be attending the University of Vermont Medical School in fall John Ribis, an MMG junior, started volunteering in the Shen lab over the summer and has rapidly become an indispensable The whole Shen lab gang! Thali Lab Over the last year and a half, the Thali lab has continued to be a relatively small, but productive operation. I (Mel Symeonides) graduated in December 2015 but have stayed on as a postdoc to help realize some of our proposed ideas in the R01 grant that we were just awarded in fall Along for the ride are undergraduates Lauren Bellfy (a graduating Senior who, since the last Newsletter, has become an expert in 3D cell culture and imaging, and gotten her name on a paper as a co-author) and Sarah Perlee (a Junior who was also just awarded a grant to continue working in the lab through the summer), and technician Anna McLean, who will be leaving us soon to start medical school. Markus has been recently busy, other than planning the lab's research direction and reviewing grants and papers, with running the MMG Seminar course and inviting and hosting a quite prestigious set of speakers from around the country to speak on various things to do with membrane fusion. MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 7

8 We have also been branching out from our home base: Markus has presented our work in Albany, NY, Nashville, TN, and Basel, Switzerland, Markus and I attended the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Retroviruses meeting once again, Lauren spent the summer assisting Dr. Gary Ward with his parasitism course at the Marine Biology Laboratory, and Anna presented work from our collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Bonnie at the Society for Reproductive Investigation conference in Montreal. Here's to another productive year with lots of traveling! Wallace Lab The Wallace Lab was sorry to say goodbye to Jia Zhou who graduated in March of 2015 with a thesis entitled, DNA Glycosylases Remove Oxidized Base Damages from G- Quadruplex DNA Structures. Jia has been very productive this year, publishing multiple papers on his research related to glycosylase function in G-Quadruplex structures and telomeric sequences. According to Jia, after he finished his PhD and had to leave his beloved Vermont. He is currently working in Dr. Yusufzai's lab at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School studying how motor proteins modulate chromatin and DNA dynamics. The Wallace Lab was also sad to say goodbye to Heather Galick who is greatly enjoying her retirement with her family at her beautiful home in Hinesburg. The Wallace Lab has always been fortunate to attract talented undergraduates, and this year was no exception. Krystina Kattermann (2015) was mentored in the lab by Carolyn Marsden, and won the 2014 Nicole J. Ferland award for her research project investigating SNPs in NEIL1. Krystina then went on to win the 2015 Lucille P. Markey Outstanding Senior in Molecular Genetics as well as the 2015 MMG Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year Award in her senior year before graduating Suma Cum Laude. Krystina is now working as a research technician in a lab at Mass General Cancer Center in Boston and enjoying life. Niles Trigg (2017) joined the lab in the fall of 2014 working under Scott Kathe on the development of new DNA substrates for single molecule studies. His current research investigating the role of the G83D residue of NEIL1 glycosylase in recognition of cisplatin and carboplatin induced DNA damages is funded by a 2016 UVM summer undergraduate research (SURF) award. He is also the recipient of the 2016 Alexander Kende Academic Merit Award. The Wallace Lab is proud of Lindsay Volk for being admitted to several PhD programs, and she will be pursuing a degree in biomedical sciences at University of New Mexico. In addition, Lindsay welcomed a new dog, Rudy, and a new cat, Fluffernutter, to her family! Finally, Andrea Lee (Postdoc), Matthew Liptak (UVM Prof. of Chemistry), and big sister Jackie welcomed a new baby girl to their family. Anna Lee Liptak was born on February 21, Ward Lab The Ward lab has welcomed a number of new students this year: undergrads Nora, Mac and Eric, and CMB rotons Evan and Chris. Shruthi defended her dissertation in December and is MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 8

9 currently out at UC Davis doing a postdoc on (yay!) Toxoplasma. The picture shows Shruthi with the traditional Ward lab PhD Toxo cake, this one adorned with cleaved and uncleaved AMA1 molecules. Jenna is entering into the home stretch of her thesis studies, and was awarded an ASM Travel Grant to present her yeast-3- hybrid work at the 2016 ASM Microbe meeting in Boston in June. Congratulations Jenna! Pramod is entering into the home stretch of the green card application process, and super-tech Anne continues to somehow keep the whole operation running. Best wishes to all lab alumni; come visit next time you re in Burlington! Erika English joined the lab as a technician, coming to us after her time as an undergraduate and then technician with Liz Dolce at Johnson State College. We have had a number of undergrads come through the lab since the last newsletter, including two students from the Rubenstein School and two from the NSF REU Human impacts on Lake Champlain that have conducted collaborative work on fish/invertebrate genetics and bacteria associated with algal blooms, respectively, on the lake. The fish genetic work is a collaboration with Drs. Jason Stockwell and Ellen Marsden and is overseen by biology graduate student Peter Euclide, who does much of his work in our lab. Wargo Lab Since the last newsletter, Jamie Meadows graduated with her Ph.D. from MMG with her thesis titled Carnitine and O-acylcarnitines in Pseudomonas aeruginosa: metabolism, transport, regulation. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in the Gladden Lab and adapting to life in California. Shortly before Jamie left, CMB graduate student Lauren Hinkel joined the lab and is continuing work on Pseudomonas response to sphingosine started by Wargo Lab alum, Annette LaBauve. Adam Nock is now officially the only remaining student of the last MMG graduate class (before we combined with CMB), and is looking forward to making the first part of this sentence all past tense within the next year. CMB graduate student Graham Willsey was selected for a predoctoral training spot on the Lung Biology T32 Training Grant run by Charlie Irvin in the Vermont Lung Center. The Wargo lab enjoying some time away from the bench. We have also had five MMG undergraduates in the lab during this time. Yuzo Kevorkian graduated and joined the Shen lab as a technician. Mary Wilk worked for a year with Adam on Burkholderia gene regulation. Gabriella Sarriera is currently taking a break from bacterial genetics working as an intern in Africa. Morgen Clark is also currently oversees, in England, and has been working on Pseudomonas gene regulation and was just given a SURF award to cover her work this coming summer. Hannah Schulman has been doing work with our NASA bacteria balancing her research time with her other project in MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 9

10 Dr. Karen Lounsbury s lab. Grace Yasewicz just joined our lab this spring and is helping Lauren study Pseudomonas response to lipids. Overall, the last few years have been travel heavy for all in the lab. Matt racked up many miles and flight segments on his pre-tenure review seminar tour. Adam traveled to Israel and Taiwan and Lauren visited Scotland. Just before joining us, Erika visited Columbia. Graham even briefly escaped the fierce gravitational pull of his upstate New York roots and visited California and New Orleans. Warren R. Stinebring Outstanding Senior in Microbiology award. Dr. Stinebring was the Chair of the Department of Microbiology from hair of the gy from Other News Cardy Raper, Ph.D. keeps on talking about her memoir. She spoke at the Burlington Book Festival in the fall of 2013, and presented an invited keynote address about 'mushrooms walking into the bar' at the Vermont Bar Association's "Winter Melt" retreat in Montreal, in January this year. The new book -- a Raper family memoir short titled "An American Harvest"--is in the hands of a literary agent hopefully headed for publication. Between trips, one with Janet Kurjan, Ph.D. to Valencia and Barcelona, and sailing at her new summer place near Basin Harbor, she keeps out of mischief (somewhat) by writing, playing tennis, singing with the BSO, and tutoring reading at the Lawrence Barnes Sustainable Academy. MMG had a surprise visit in August from Warren Stinebring s two children: Daniel Stinebring, Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Oberlin College, and Beth Stinebring, former UVM staff member and Burlington resident. Dan and Beth were pleased to know that we re still honoring their father s memory with the annual MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 10

11 Microbiology and Molecular Genetics The Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics strives to be competitive in the scientific community. The Department funds many activities that bring researchers, students, postdoctoral associates and technicians together in a collegial manner to share research and ideas. These activities include, but are not limited to, graduate student activities, seminars, a departmental library, monthly departmental gatherings and retreats. Annual gifts from alumni and friends help defray the costs that grant money will not cover, and keep the excitement and drive at a high level among the various laboratories. Please consider making a contribution in support of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. You may make your gift in honor of a UVM colleague or co-worker if you would like. Enclosed is my donation of $. Name: Mailing Address: My gift is in honor of Please make checks out to The University of Vermont and send to The Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Vermont, 95 Carrigan Drive, Stafford Hall, Burlington, Vermont Gifts may also be made by credit card American Express MasterCard Visa Discover Card Number: Expiration date: You may also send your gift via the Internet. Use the following web address, Under Gift Designation be sure to check Other and type in Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. All gifts are greatly appreciated, no matter how large or small. Thank you!!! MMG Newsletter 2016 Page 11