Month: June 2013

Posted on

Lab receives new NSF Advances in Bioinformatics grant

We are excited to announce that the lab recently received funding through the National Science Foundation’s Advances in Bioinformatics (NSF-ABI) program for a new three-year collaborative project. The proposal “ABI Innovation: Breaking through the taxonomic barrier of the fossil pollen record using bioimage informatics” links the high-throughput, super-resolution structured illumination microscopy being employed at the University of Illinois with the morphological algorithms being developed by Washington Mio’s lab at Florida State and the machine learning advances made by Charless Fowlkes at University of California, Irvine.

Funding includes support for a graduate student with interest in microscopy, machine learning, and mathematical morphology – as well as pollen-curious undergraduates. Please contact Surangi (punyasena AT life.illinois.edu) for more information.

Posted on

Cassie Wesseln receives NSF Graduate Research Honorable Mention

Cassie Wesseln, a first-year PhD student and former undergraduate researcher in the Punyasena lab, received an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) earlier this year. The NSF GRFP is one of the most competitive national fellowships available to graduate students in their first two years of study. A belated congratulations to Cassie!

Cassie is also currently an NSF Integrated Graduate Research and Education Traineeship (IGERT) fellow. The IGERT fellowship in Vertically Integrated Training with Genomics – a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and UIUC collaboration – included a semester in Panama (Spring 2013). As a result of the program, Cassie was able to participate in a Tropical Ecology course led by STRI staff scientists, and in seminars and field trips conducted by over thirty different STRI scientists and fellows. In four short months, she visited almost all of the STRI research stations in Panama. Cassie adds: “It was an incredible experience in which I learned a great deal about the tropical biology and the research opportunities at STRI.”