Education
New Course: Quantitative Cell Biology Launches This Fall
A half-semester module on image quantification, tracking, and model fitting, co-taught by the Chen and Farrell labs. Open to second-years and above; no prior coding assumed.
Cellular, Molecular & Biomedical SciencesUniversity of Vermont
The Culture
May 2026
Grant season closes, and the cohort scatters for summer fieldwork.
Education Updates
Education · Internal
Core Facility Adds Spatial Transcriptomics
The Xenium platform is installed and taking pilot projects. Rates are subsidized for CMB students through June. Training sessions run every other Tuesday; the queue is already three weeks deep, so plan accordingly.
Education · Internal
Microscopy Workshop: Deconvolution From First Principles
Three sessions, hands-on, limited to twelve. Bring your own dataset or use ours.
Program Updates
Program
Welcome to the 2026 Cohort
Nineteen students joined us in August from fourteen institutions across nine states and four countries. They arrived to a heat wave and a broken elevator in Given, and seem undeterred.
Student & Faculty News
News
Retirement: Professor Alan Whitcomb, After 34 Years
Al arrived in 1992 with a freezer full of Drosophila and an argument about kinase specificity he has still not conceded. He trained 41 graduate students, chaired the curriculum committee through three redesigns, and taught the introductory genetics sequence every single year without exception. His lab will close in December. The reception is May 14th, and the stories will be extensive.
News
Two CMB Students Win Travel Awards to Keystone
Jamie Fournier and Rosa Delgado will present posters at the Keystone Symposium on Tumor Metabolism in Banff this March.
News
New Preprint: Cold Adaptation in Alpine Bumblebee Flight Muscle
Collaboration with the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Lab. Field collection happened on Mount Mansfield last August, which is a better commute than most structural biology has.
News
Okonjo Named Associate Editor at Circulation Research
A three-year term beginning in January.
News
Farrell Lab Receives Vermont Genetics Network Pilot Award
Funding supports preliminary work on thermal tolerance loci ahead of a planned R21 submission.
News
Priya Raghunathan Defends, Heads to UCSF
Priya successfully defended in October and starts a postdoc with the Cheng lab in January. Her thesis work on ribosome assembly produced three first-author papers and one very memorable committee meeting.
News
Cover Art: December Issue of Journal of Cell Biology
Confocal section of a regenerating zebrafish fin, imaged by second-year student Tobias Lund. The editors chose it from 60 submissions.
News
Hargrove Elected AAAS Fellow
Recognized for contributions to the structural biology of RNA-protein assembly and for sustained mentorship of graduate students. The induction ceremony is in February.