News#
9/25/2026 Wow, it’s been two years since the last news update! There is lots of good news to share from the lab.
Several papers are out.
PIGEON-FEATHER is published in Nature Chemical Biology as the cover article! Congrats to Chenlin, Malcolm, Andrew, and Savannah!
The PFLink paper is published in Bioinformatics! Congrats to Kyle and Chenlin, and our collaborators at HDX Workbench!
Our paper on how different energetic blueprints evolved in the VFT fold, Distinct energetic blueprints diversify function of conserved protein folds, is published in Nature Chemistry! Congrats to Malcolm, Chenlin, Daniel, Kyle, and coauthors! Check out Erin’s cool work in this paper on rationally engineering allosteric transcription factors using the blueprint that we discovered.
We have three collaborations out.
with the Vasan lab on the role of SHP2 in drug resistance (A hotspot phosphorylation site on SHP2 drives oncoprotein activation and drug resistance, Nature Communications)
with the Kwong and Shapiro labs on HSV-1 glycoprotein B immunoevasion (Prefusion structure, evasion and neutralization of HSV-1 glycoprotein B, Nature Microbiology)
with Becky Haeusler and Jenn Gamarra on manganese and insulin sensitivity (Manganese availability determines insulin sensitivity by enhancing Akt activity), which was accepted at the Journal of Clinical Investigation!
PFNet is published in Nature Communications! Congrats to Chenlin, Kyle, Savannah, and Andrew!
Our PFK paper is published in JACS! What a journey. Congrats to Belen and Chenlin!
Nature Chemical Biology, February 2026
Undergraduates and postbacs.
We’ve graduated some strong scientists: Erin, Emily, and Steven!
Erin joined the biophysics graduate program at UCSF!
Emily is joining the CUMC graduate program!
Steven is staying in our lab as a CUMC graduate student!
We recruited excellent undergraduate researchers Karen, Erica, and Bissan! Karen and Erica, along with Chloe for the third year running, procured their own external funding to do research over the summer.
Awards and presentations.
Click for photos of our posters and talks.
Almost everyone in the lab presented their work somewhere, from poster presentations to department talks to major conferences.
We earned some poster prizes, including Will and our future postdoc, Karol, at the Protein Society meeting!
Chenlin got his K99/R00! This is a huge deal! He will be an amazing PI.
Erin and Daniel Pineda both earned NSF graduate fellowships! Daniel also started an NSF GRFP writing class in their graduate program at UC Berkeley, modeled after our program, which was successful with several awards.
Steven earned a spot on the Molecular Biophysics & Structural Biology T32 Training Grant!
Malcolm defended his Ph.D., wow! Our lab’s first Ph.D. He’s now doing exciting work in the proteomics and cryo-EM space as a postdoc at NYSBC.
Savannah made this amazing poster.
Emily made this amazing cake.
More photos from Malcolm’s party.
New equipment. Thanks to a generous friend at AbCellera, we received a lot of supplies and a microfluidizer when the company closed its Boston site!
Photos by Editha Mesina. Belen’s mom, Editha Mesina, who is a professor of photography at NYU, took these awesome photos of the lab when she visited.
Click for more of these cool photos.
Computational workshop. Thanks to Kyle and Belen for presenting detailed PIGEON and PARROTS workflows. It was super fun to develop protein inhibitors to various targets in real time, as a lab! The next day, we discussed how we should ethically use AI tools to take our research to the next level.
Babies in the lab. We’re up to three Glasgow Lab babies. Awesome!
Grants. We are grateful for continued research funding from NIH NIGMS, NIBIB, and NIDDK (R35, R21, R01), our NSF grant, support from the Rosetta Commons and the American Cancer Society, private funds from industry partners, and a Paul Marks Scholar Award.
Click for more lab photos.
Watch this space for more cool science!!!
9/4/2024 A new academic year begins after a super-fast summer.
Many updates from the last year:
New lab members. Daniel Sultanov joined the lab as a postdoc last Fall after finishing his Ph.D. at NYU. Chloe Allan from Barnard joined us in the Spring and spent the summer here as an SRI student. Steven Rimmasch arrived in the summer from Utah as an NSF-Rosetta Commons RaMP postbac. Happy you are here!
Preprints and publications.
Our MAGPIE method was published in Protein Science! Use it to visualize and analyze protein-ligand interactions en masse. Congrats to authors Daniel, Kyle, and Belen.
Our PIGEON-FEATHER method is available on bioRxiv! Have you ever wondered how every single amino acid in your protein contributes energetically to its conformational ensemble, and how that changes due to ligand binding or mutations? We have you covered. Congrats to authors Chenlin, Malcolm, and Andrew.
We also contributed to this perspective in Cell Systems about how machine learning in protein modeling and design can be useful for biological discovery.
Student achievements. Our students knocked it out of the park this year.
Malcolm passed his thesis prospectus!
Kyle and Savannah passed their quals!
… and they both earned NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!
Melody earned an NSF GRFP honorable mention! (and is now back in our lab for their first rotation as a grad student! Yeah!)
Belen earned an NIH F31 fellowship!
Andrew spearheaded major mass spec troubleshooting and repair efforts!
Erin graduated with her BS in Biology, with department honors! We are so pleased that she’s sticking around for another year as a postbac together with Steven, after a brief break to teach the Rosetta bootcamp (twice).
Presentations. Kyle, Chenlin, Andrew, Savannah, Chloe, Erin, Emily, and Daniel traveled near and far to present posters. Belen, Airam, Malcolm, and Chenlin gave talks on their work. They won a lot of prizes, including a really big check…
Intra-lab education. Chenlin, Erin, and Steven taught our annual summer computational workshop, with a focus this year on MD simulations and PyRosetta. It was amazing. Belen and Kyle got creative in a protein folding design challenge in our molecular biophysics course.
Gardening. Our bench garden is out of control. Can you spot the giant okras?
August |
September |
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We are definitely in log phase, watch this space for more cool science this year!!
7/2/2023 It’s summer!
We have a lot to celebrate:
We got some of our work out there.
A large collaborative paper that describes our computational pipeline to get more information from cryo-EM structures of complexes, and which shows how our designed ACE2 traps neutralize new strains of SARS-CoV-2. (So crazy to see our strategy for developing mutation-resistant viral therapeutics tested in a real life pandemic.)
Our paper diving into the allosteric mechanism of the lac repressor.
A preprint in collaboration with our neighbors in the Steckelberg lab, which is about the evolution of viral protein inhibition of the human ribosome.
At the end of the summer, Daniel will join the Biophysics graduate program at UC Berkeley! Congratulations to our first graduate. :’) They will do great in California.
Columbia undergraduates Emily and Pranav joined the lab, and they both also secured outside summer funding to support their research. Nice! Thanks very much, I. I. Rabi Scholars Program and Donald Margolis Internship Fund.
After a productive rotation, Savannah McBride officially joined the lab fom the CUMC Genetics and Development graduate program. Welcome!
Melody and Airam join us for the summer from the Amgen program and the Rosetta Commons REU program, respectively. Welcome!
Belen and Andrew were the first students from our lab to pass their qualifying exams! Great job. See their cool posters (courtesy of Chenlin and Savannah).
Emily made this amazing cake that looks like Andrew’s face.
We finally have functional, networked servers.
Daniel presented their work at the SURF poster session, Kyle gave a talk in the BMB seminar series, and Chenlin gave a talk at the Columbia Biochem/Biophysics Mixer.
Andrew was Honorably Mentioned for his NSF GRFP application. Nice!
Belen organized two lessons at Hamilton Grange Middle School in Washington Heights to engage in some fun science with our young neighbors.
Daniel and Kyle started the summer off by organizing a useful intra-lab computational workshop.
We are working hard this summer to move our projects along!
10/15/2022 We’ve had a good summer and fall.
Some updates:
Belen and Andrew officially joined the lab, and Kyle is officially a graduate student!
Neel joined us as a Rosetta intern over the summer, and then lucky for us, he continues here as a Columbia undergraduate!
Chenlin joined the lab as our venerated postdoc!
Despite COVID hitting our group (again), Belen and Neel made it to RosettaCon 2022, where they presented cool posters.
Neel’s poster |
Belen’s poster |
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We are grateful for support from the JGI/DOE Community Research Program in Functional Genomics (towards computationally redesigning transcription factors for continuous microbial bioprocessing of plastics), Orange Grove Bio and Alleycorp (backing our PARROTS pipeline to build new antiviral biotherapeutics), NIH NIGMS (for our efforts to understand general principles for protein allostery), the Alice Bohmfalk Foundation (funds to buy computers), and the NSF ACCESS program (compute credits).
Our lab co-hosted an NSF GRFP writing workshop in September, and we put in a few of our own applications.
I’m proud of our lab members for working together and helping each other grow their projects.
Our tomato plants also grew a lot. See below.
5/26/22 The Glasgow Lab is HERE 😎
It’s been a great first semester!
Some updates:
our lab is a member of the Rosetta Commons
we had some lab renovations and got equipment
our first two rotation students, Kyle Helms and Julia Urban, joined us in January and left us in April. We miss them and their fantastic science
our next batch of rotation students, Andrew Reckers and Belen Sundberg, joined us in April. They are really awesome
after optimizing and troubleshooting for a couple months, Malcolm collected our first large HDX/MS datasets (shoutout to the world-class ASRC MS facility!)
Daniel got an Amgen scholarship for summer research!
Daniel, Kyle W. and Anum completed Columbia’s Lab-to-Market bootcamp - here’s a 1-min video about our project
Kyle W. designed and tested his first set of artificial transcription factors (and was admitted to Columbia for grad school!)
we applied for grants
we all gave our first group meetings
Daniel and Kyle W. learned a lot at pyrosetta bootcamp
we triumphed/survived some plasmid contamination issues and rampant COVID
We’re excited to go hard this summer to advance our ongoing basic science, applied, and methods development research projects!