News
Featured in Rutgers Today, Rutgers SAS, Aresty Research Center, and more, our undergrad, Akanksha Mathivanan voices out the story about her own Traumatic Brain Injury, her passion for public advocacy of Traumatic Brain Injury in high school sports as well as her scientific interests in the complex injury she studies in the lab! She strives to become a physician-scientist and achieve more in this field as she grows as a researcher and science communicator! Congrats Akanksha!!
Vinithra Kathirvel, a sophomore studying Cell Biology and Neuroscience joins our lab through Project SUPER! Under the supervision of Dr. Keisuke Fukumura, she will study how age and high fat diet interact to accelerate degradation of circadian output signals in Drosophila melanogaster.
With our first lab baby coming soon, we celebrated Naureen’s baby shower with lovely decorations and happy vibes. The room was filled with food, fun, laughter, and lots of love to shower Naureen and her little one on the way with gifts and cheers. Congratulations Naureen on becoming a soon-to-be mom!
Evan Cirone, a sophomore studying Cell Biology and Neuroscience joins our lab to work on identifying connectivity between clock neurons and Pars-Intercerebralis neuron populations! Welcome Evan!
Flying in all the way from Japan, we welcome Keisuke Fukumura, our first postdoc! His role in the lab will be to investigate how unfavorable nutritional status affects circadian function and aging in Drosophila!
Today, the Barber Lab traveled to UPenn for the Chronobiology and Sleep Institute’s Annual Research Symposium 2022! We got to hear lots of great talks about circadian control and sleep function and effects in neurological diseases. Congratulations to our graduate student, Naureen Hameed and undergraduate student, Akanksha Mathivanan also won awards for “Best Poster Presentation”!
Seanna Kelly, a first-year graduate student joins our lab for her first rotation to work on improving the auxin-inducible gene expression system (AGES) by incorporating an improved auxin inducible degron (AID2) technology involving mutated TIR1 receptors and use of the auxin analog 5-Ph-IAA!
Akanksha wins an award for her first research poster presentation on investigating how Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) induces sleep dysregulation in fruit flies at the Aresty Summer Science Annual Symposium 2022! Impressive accomplishment for a freshman who joined the lab just 10 weeks ago! Over the summer, she injured flies at different voltages to induce various severities of TBI in flies. After injury, their activity was recorded using Drosophila Activity Monitoring systems. From this data, the flies’ circadian rhythm strength, period length, and activity, and most interestingly, sleep was uncovered over a 7-day period!
