pove lab

Dr. JP Maree has been awarded a prestigious fellowship through the Crick Africa Network supported by LifeArc. He’ll start this fall! Read more here https://www.crick.ac.uk/news/2024-03-26_eight-leading-african-researchers-awarded-training-fellowships

Blyss, Faith, Edwin, and Maddie (one last hurrah!) all presented posters at the Molecular Parasitology Meeting in Woods Hole, MA.

Former undergraduate and fantastic researcher Maddie Malfara had her last day today. She’s off to pursue a PhD at Brown University. We wish you all the best and you will be missed!

Faith, Blyss, JP, Alexa, and JP all attended the Pennsylvania Parasitology Conference (PAraCon) held in State College, PA. The matching outfits were allegedly not planned.

Nikki, Alexa, and Maddie all presented their work at the Kinetoplastid Molecular Cell Biology Meeting in Woods Hole, MA. Nikki and Maddie both had a talk in the first session!

Congrats to Kelly Hodges for successfully defending her master’s thesis entitled “Determining the role of cAMP signaling in cellular adhesion and parasite-vector interactions in Crithidia fasciculata“.

Congratulations to Andre R. Williams, Jr. for graduating with a BS degree in biology and completing a senior thesis entitled “Phosphodiesterase inhibitors block in vitro Adhesion of Crithidia fasciculata“. Andre is on to an NIH-funded bridge program at UMass-Amherst to prepare for a PhD program.

We are hiring! Our new NSF-funded, highly-collaborative project will examine the response of Crithidia parasites to different pollens in vitro and in vivo. We are interested in mechanisms of adhesion and genetic manipulation of kinetoplastid pathogens of bees. Please contact Dr. Povelones if you are interested. We have a fully-funded MS student position and a full-time research technician position available.

We are very excited about our first publication since our move to Villanova University. First author Maddie Malfara has been working on this project on and off since 2017, when she was an undergraduate in the lab. Working with collaborators at Penn State Schuylkill and Villanova University, we found a novel set of compounds that kill T. brucei by disrupting endocytosis, mitochondrial division, and the cell cycle. We’re hoping that these compounds will provide new ways to probe the connection between these essential processes.