Category: People

Yuping Lu comes to us part time from the lab of Dr. John Balsevich here at NRC.  Yuping is an expert plant natural products chemist.  She is joining our group to carry out wheat metabolite fractionation and enrichment.  She will be working with Dr. Kishore Rajagopalan and Ms. Khanh Luu on elucidation of functional aspects of fungal disease resistance and susceptibilty in wheat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are pleased to welcome Khanh Luu to the lab.  Khanh is a new graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, coming to us from Vietnam, via the USA and Australia.  She is a student through the WCVM, Dept of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences.  Her project is on the structure-function characterization of select anion channels  involved in mediating the deposition of fusarium head blight toxin in wheat, which if fed as feed, has negative effects on livestock .  Her project is a collaboration between the labs of Dr. Sister (Michele) Loewen and Dr.  Brother (Matthew) Loewen, as Khanh has taken to calling us.  This work is funded by individual NSERC discovery grants to both Brother and Sister Loewen.

Fraser is a student in the University of Victoria Cooperative program in Microbiology and Biochemistry. His summer position in our lab is funded by the NRC wheat flagship. He will be working with Cameron Gordon on deciphering the role of abscisic acid in the modulation of wheat diseases.

We are pleased to announce that Cameron Gordon has returned to the lab as of February 2012 to work on a Master’s Degree in Biochemistry. Cameron previously worked with us as a 4th year project student on fungal pheromone receptors and will be shifting to now focus on wheat phytohormone receptors.

We are pleased to have Ms. Li Feng join our group as of September 1, 2011.  Li is working as a technical officer with Dr. Olesya Kharenko on a project funded by the Genomics and Health Initiative, looking at energy in plants.  Li’s expertise in plant transformation and characterization will be a veritable asset to the group, as attested to by the last post regarding the labs failed attempts to grow a pumpkin prior to Li being hired.

We are very pleased to have Allison Didychuk return to the lab for a second summer. Allison has now completed her third year at James Town College majoring in Math and Biochemistry.  She is working with Dang Van, Pooja Choudhary and Stephanie Kendall on solving the NMR structure of the N-terminal domain of the yeast pheromone G-protein coupled receptor Ste2p.  Her project is funded by an NSERC Discovery Grant that has been funding the Loewen Lab for almost 6 years now. Allison is also helping write up a manuscript arising from work she carried out last year on a Plants for Health and Wellness funded project related to monitoring the effect of plant natural products on insulin secretion from pancreatic cells.

We are pleased to have Samantha Kampman join the Loewen Lab for the summer. She comes to us from the University of Victory on Vancouver Island where she is registered in the Cooperative Biochemistry and Microbiology program.  Sam will be working with Dr. Olesya Kharenko on the co-crystallization of Arabidopsis thaliana START domain ABA receptors with a variety of novel agonists.  Her position is funded by the NRC Genomics and Health Initiative which has been funding the Loewen Lab for 10 years now.

We are pleased to have Dr. Kishore Rajagopalan join the lab.  Kishore comes to us from Heidelberg Germany, where we was previously working as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Zentrum fur Molekulare Biologie der Universitat Heidelberg.  He will be joining Dr. Olesya Kharenko working on abscisic acid binding-protein structural and functional characterization related projects in collaboration with Dr. Sue Abrams.

We are pleased to welcome Cameron Gordon, of the University of Saskatchewan to the lab. Cameron joined us in Early September as part of the Biochemistry Project Course program. He will be working with Stephanie Kendall and Pooja Choudhary throughout the winter on our NSERC funded G-protein Coupled Receptor Project, making and structurally characterizing mutants of the yeast receptor Ste2p.

We are pleased to welcome Ms. Allison Didychuk, of Jamestown College ND, to the lab for the summer. Allison is majoring in Biochemistry and Math.  She started with us mid-May and is working primarily in collaboration with Mr. Jason Boyd on a project establishing the role of Abscisic Acid in Human Health focussing on mammalian cell culture techniques and assays as well as in silico protein 3D modelling and docking.