Spring 2023
May 2023. Lou gave a talk at Stanford, where she did her postdoctoral research! We said goodbye to our graduating seniors. They will be missed.
April 2023. Christina McBride (’23) has committed to attend the University of Michigan Program in Chemical Biology for graduate school!
March 2023. Christina McBride (’23) (in collaboration with Eric Miller and Lou) published “An updated catalogue of diverse type II polyketide synthase biosynthetic gene clusters captured from large-scale nucleotide databases” in Microbial Genomics. Lou gave a talk “Unveiling the biological chemistry of polyketide biosynthetic pathways by embracing the unexplored and unexpected” at the WCC Rising Stars Symposium at ACS Spring 2023!
The lab has celebrated so many achievements this month that we need an additional paragraph of updates! Christina McBride (’23) and Grayson Hamrick (’21) were both awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, Bayan Mostaghim (’23) was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to do research in Switzerland, and Vy Le (’25) was admitted to the competitive Penn Access Summer Scholars (PASS) early assurance medical school program! Our collaborator at the University of Jena (Dr. Mai Anh Tran) successfully defended her PhD. Congratulations team!!
February 2023. Lou was promoted to full professor! Lou was also a recipient of the ACS Women Chemists Committee’s Rising Star Award.
January 2023. Meg Bowen (’23) was selected for a two-year Medical Career Design Fellowship in the Division of Orthopaedics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)!
Fall 2022
December 2022. Lou (in collaboration with Casey Londergan) published a paper on terminal alkenes in the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B!
October 2022. Lou gave a talk “Unveiling the underpinnings of polyketide synthases for access to expanded chemical diversity” as a part of the Natural Product Sciences Webinar for the American Society of Pharmacognosy.
September 2022. Bayan Mostaghim (’23), Christina McBride (’23), Kevin Li (’24), Trisha Phan (’24), Shahla Mukhtar (’24), Kenneth Hsu (’25), and Vy Le (’25) presented posters at the KINSC Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium!
Summer 2022
August 2022. Christina McBride (’23) gave a technical talk and poster presentation at the 2022 Regional Beckman Symposium at Rutgers University, and Lou co-curated and edited the publication Confronting Failure: Approaches to Building Confidence and Resilience in Undergraduate Researchers. Additionally, the lab’s NSF RUI proposal has been funded!
July 2022. Lou attended the 2022 Cottrell Scholar Conference, and Mai Anh Tran visited us from Germany!
June 2022. Congrats to Bayan Mostaghim (’23) and Christina McBride (’23) for presenting posters at the 50th Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society! Bayan earned an ACS poster award for his awesome presentation. Christina also presented at the 2nd Annual Goldwater Symposium. Lou attended the 2022 Bioorganic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference and the 2022 ConnectUR Conference. Yay for scientific communication!
Spring 2022
May 2022. Lou was selected as the first recipient of the CUR’s Silvia Ronco Innovative Mentor Award! Grayson Hamrick (’21) (in collaboration with Casey Londergan and Lou) published our methods and tips for the expression, purification, and characterization of type II PKS ACPs in Methods of Molecular Biology. Lou also co-led the 2022 FLAMEnet Workshop on “Changing Culture to Build Student Resilience” at Emory University. Great work, team!
April 2022. Christina McBride (’23) was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship! Lou co-authored two publications: one on the use of ActinoBase to study Streptomyces in White Rose Research Online, and another studying the cytochrome P450 OxyA from the kistamicin biosynthesis cyclization cascade in Frontiers in Chemistry. Lou also served as a panelist for the 2022 National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Symposium, and gave an invited seminar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
March 2022. Bayan Mostaghim (’23) and Kevin Li (’24) were selected as KINSC Summer Scholars!
January 2022. Our postdoc Dr. Yae In Cho published on engineered chimeras of acyl carrier proteins in Biochemistry! Congrats Yae In, and to the other co-authors from the Charkoudian lab and the 2019 Biochemistry Superlab course members!
Spring 2021
March 2021. Christina McBride (’23) was selected as an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Scholar!
January 2021. Ari Sulpizio (’21), Callie Crawford (’22) and Rebecca Koweek (’22) published a review on type II polyketide synthase acyl carrier proteins in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Summer 2020
August 2020. Our NIH R15 grant ‘functional hybrid natural product syntheses by tracking acyl carrier protein conformational dynamics’ was funded! Thank you for believing in us, NIH!
Spring 2020
May 2020. Josh Klein (’20) and Yang Wu (’19) published their work on heterologous expression and characterization of a novel type II polyketide synthase in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.
Fall 2019
November 2019. Grayson Hamrick (’21) won the Outstanding Presentation in Chemical Biology award for his oral presentation at the Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium at Rice University!
October 2019. Kofi Acheampong (’19) published his work on a novel colorimetric assay in Scientific Reports!
Spring 2019
May 2019. Sam Esptein (’19) and Emily Winesett (’16) published their work in Nature Communications!! Congratulations!
May 2019. Hard works pays off. The Charkoudian Lab receives tenure!
May 2019. Kofi Acheampong (’19) won a best poster prize at the 2019 Fronteirs at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology Symposium! Congrats, Kofi!
January 2019. We are super excited to share our symbiotic outreach project to the community in our lastest paper in PLoS Biology! Thanks to Steph Terrell (’18), Lindsey Lopes (’16), Sarah Waldis and Kristin Lindgren for the great ideas and hard work.
Fall 2018
September 2018. Our paper was accepted to AIChE Journal! This effort was led by Marco Rivas (’18), Valentine Courouble (’17) and the 2016 Biochemistry Superlab course. Great job, team!
Spring 2018
April 2018. Sam Epstein (’19) was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship! Also, Sam’s paper with Marnix Medema was accepted to Standards in Genomic Science! Congratulations, Sam! We are so proud! Congrats to Marco, Josh, Yang, Vaso, Sam and Steph for presenting at the 2018 Experimental Biology Meeting in San Diego! Great job!
February 2018. Lou was one of 24 early career scientists named a 2018 Cottrell Scholar! Thank you for believing in us, Research Corporation for Science Advancement!
January 2018. Our paper on collaborating with undergraduates to contribute to biochemistry community resources was accepted to Biochemistry as part of The Future of Biochemistry special issue.
Fall 2017
October 2017: Our paper from the 2015 Biochemistry Superlab course was accepted to PLoS Biology! Congratulations, team!! What a fantastic outcome of the first ever Biochemistry Superlab course at Haverford!
Summer 2017
July: Our paper was accepted to RSC Advances! Congratulations to Aurelio, Niki, and Josh. This work was done in collaboration with fellow Haverford Chemistry Professor Karin Akerfeldt and Max Cryle (Monash University).
Spring 2017
May: Our paper was accepted to Biochemistry! Congratulations to Connie, Katie, and Grace!!
April: Our seniors are going to graduate school! Congratulations to Aurelio (Harvard!), Grace (Duke!) and Valentine (Scripps!). The future of science is bright with you guys in charge.
January: We published a paper in J. Chem. Ed. about our experience in using mechanistic crosslinking in Superlab! This work was done in collaboration with the Burkart Lab at UCSD and Beld Lab at Drexel. Good work, team!
Fall 2016
December: Our lab’s NSF CAREER Award was funded! Hooray! And many thanks to 2016 Biochemistry Superlab students for their help in acquiring and analyzing some of the preliminary data used in this grant!
Summer 2016
August: Thanks for the great summer, Charkoudian Lab!
July: Congratulations to Aurelio Mollo (’17) on his recent paper in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.! The work was conducted in collaboration with the Cryle Lab (Monash University).
June: Our commentary in Nature Chemical Biology, “Designing convergent chemical curricula” was published! We hope to inspire others to contribute to our online repository of innovative chemistry curricula: https://sites.tufts.edu/convergentchemistry/
Our lab was awarded an AREA grant from the NIH! And baby Mabel joined the reseach team. What a great month!
Spring 2016
February: The “Fungal Challenge” manuscript was accepted to Fungal Genetics and Biology! Congratulations to all members of Spring 2015 CHEM 357 (19 Haverford and Bryn Mawr undergraduate co-authors!)
January: Congratulations to Niki von Krusenstiern (’15) and Emily Winesett (’16) who worked with the Fairman Lab (Haverford Biology) and Cryle Lab (Monash University) to investigate how peptidyl carrier proteins recognize P450 oxygenases! Our findings were published in Analytical Biochemistry!
Fall 2015
Sept 2015: Erin Berlew’s (’15) paper with “Team West Coast” was published in PNAS! Congratulations, Erin!!
Congratulations to Emily, Grace, Katie, Aurelio, and Josh on giving fantastic presentations at the annual KINSC symposium!
Summer 2015
July 2015: Happy 2nd Anniversary, Charkoudian Lab!
May 2015: Erin, Niki, and Connie graduate!! Congratulations! Welcome to Grace and Aurelio, the newest members of the Charkoudian Lab! Emily presents her work at the 2015 Frontiers in Chemistry and Biology Interface Symposium. Congratulations to Emily on receiving a KINSC summer scholarship and Katie on receiving a BA Rudolph Foundation STEM Scholarship.
Spring 2015
February 2015: Connie presents her research at the 2015 Biophysical Society meeting and Lou receives a 2015 Cottrell College Science Award!
Fall 2014
September 2014: Welcome to the newest members of the Charkoudian Lab, Noah Bloch, Josh Bulos, and Michael Jordan!
Summer 2014
August 2014: Matt’s work on probing the phosphopantetheine arm of acyl carrier proteins was published in JACS and highlighted in C&EN News! Congratulations, Matt!!
June 2014: Connie returns from Sweden. Her spring 2014 semester was spent at Lund University, researching under the guidance of Sara Linse, Karin Åkerfeldt and other protein chemistry specialists. Connie will continue protein research with her return to the states by following up Matt Johnson’s exciting studies on acyl carrier proteins.
May 2014: The Charkoudian lab welcomes their newest member, Emily Winesett. As a junior chemistry major, Emily will be continuing and expanding on Alec De Vivo’s work from the previous year.
Fall 2014
Chemistry Professor Lou Charkoudian ’03 Publishes Groundbreaking Study
