Welcome to the Frank Lab

February 2025 - Michelle Heeney wins the CALS 3-minute thesis competition! https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/CALS%20Second%20Annual%20Three-Minute%20Thesis%20Online%20Event/1_tpmmwh4y

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November 2024 - Vesna Bacheva welcomes her baby boy, Jaime!!! 

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November 2024 - Tian Gong presents at the ASA, CSSA, and SSSA International Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX

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October 2024 - Sam Yanders, Weiwei Chen, Brandon Williams, Noor AlBader, Michelle Heeney, and Margaret (plus twins and grandparents) go to Tucson for the annual CROPPS conference. Brandon gave a keynote presentation, and the twins survived their first flights : )

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October 2024 - Elise Boisvert passed her A-exam and advanced to PhD candidacy.

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August 2024 - Michelle and Margaret receive a FICUS award to collaborate with EMSL and JGI and identifying long-distance signals controlling biomass accumulation: https://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/news/thirteen-projects-funded-through-ficus-program

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August 2024 - Former lab member, Hannah Thomas, starts her lab as a 100 Talents Young Professor at Zhejiang University. She also published the last chapter of her thesis in Hort Res: https://academic.oup.com/hr/article/11/12/uhae255/7755087

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August 2024 - We conclude another action-packed summer of research with our REU students - Nat Michaels, Etienne Exantus (a high school scientist!), and Lara Jacobowitz. Etienne is featured here where he won one of the10 Global Challenge Awards at the Global Youth Institute in Des Moine, Iowa: https://www.instagram.com/p/DDNeYDdSpDP/?igsh=eGVyMGFjcjZpNDln

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June 2024 - Margaret had her twins, Graham and Annabel 😱😱

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May 2024 - Dr. Arielle Johnson and Dr. Nicole Szeluga defended their PhD theses. Arielle is now a postdoc in Jen Brophy's lab at Stanford and Nicole is now a postdoc in Alex Harkess' lab at Hudson Alpha.

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Spring 2024 - Elise Boisvert and Kensy Rodriguez-Herrera AND Michelle Heeney Kenneth Buck receive Schmittau-Novak grants!

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Spring 2024 - Our amazing lab tech, Sam Pelletier, picks the University of Minnesota's Plant and Microbial Biology department for her PhD. She'll be working in Katie Greenham's lab!

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Spring 2024 - Sam Yanders joined the Frank lab as a new PhD student!

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Lots happened between February 2022 - Spring 2024, but Margaret was too busy to update the website.

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Feb 2022 - Margaret is co-hosting the Northeast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology (NESDB 2022) this spring

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August 2021 - We welcome Audrey Widmier to the lab. She'll be working on graft junction genetics as an NSF REPS intern! 

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August 2021 - Congratulations to Arielle Johnson for her recently published review in COPB titled: "Growing a Glue Factory: Open Questions in Laticifer Development"

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January 2021- Congratulations to Yuanzheng Yue for publishing his doctoral and post-doc work titled: "Insight into the petunia Dof transcription factor family reveals a new regulator of male-sterility"

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January 2021- Congratulations to Brandon Williams and Umair Ahsan for their recently published review titled: "Getting to the root of grafting-induced traits."

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October 2020- Allie Hermanson and Paul Chong, senior undergraduate research assistants, were awarded the American Society of Horticultural Science's Scholarship Achievement Award. 

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October 2020- The Frank lab is happy to welcome Hamid Razifard as a new post-doctoral researcher. He joined the lab from UMAmherst where he studied the evolution of Solanum. 

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August 2020: Collaborative publication with Xia lab is printed in Science Direct: "TBtools: An Integrative Toolkit Developed for Interactive Analyses of Big Biological Data".   doi.org/10.1016/j.molp.2020.06.009

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July 2020: The National Science Foundation recently awarded Frank a five-year, $1.3 million Faculty Early Career Development Program grant for her proposal, “Harnessing the Plant Mobileome to Predict, Design, and Deliver Long-Distance RNAs in Plants.” See article.

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June 2020: Hannah Thomas awarded USDA Pre-doctoral Fellowship for "Understanding the role of intercellular communication in vegetable crop grafting" See article. 

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May 2020: Frank Lab takes part in collaboration with Ithaca Children’s Garden (ICG), to create 1,000 at-home gardening kits for local families. See article.

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