Older Lab News (archive)

  • April 2019: The first draft of the redwood genome is released. The giant genome (26.5 Gb) of this giant tree was sequenced and assembled by the Salzberg and Timp labs at Hopkins, in collaboration with David Neale at UC Davis and the Save the Redwoods League.
  • November 2018: Ph.D. student Rachel Sherman leads a a new study in Nature Genetics describing the African pan-genome.
  • November 2018: The CHESS human gene catalog is published in Genome Biology, in a paper led by Ela Pertea and including lab members Ales Varabyou, Alaina Shumate, and Florian Breitwieser.
  • July 2018: Our collaborator Prof. Mihaela (Ela) Pertea is awarded a 3-year, $993,000 NSF grant to support her work on transcriptome assembly from RNA-seq data.
  • July 6, 2018: Steven Salzberg gave the opening keynote talk for ISMB 2018, the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference, in Chicago.
  • May 2018: Associate Research Scientist Aleksey Zimin is awarded a 3-year, $500,000 USDA grant to support his work on genome assembly.
  • Apr 2018: Steven Salzberg elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Founded in 1780, the Academy honors exceptional scholars, leaders, artists, and innovators and engages them in sharing knowledge and addressing challenges facing the world.
  • Feb 2018: Former student Cole Trapnell, an Asst. Prof at U. Washington, wins this year’s Overton Prize from ISCB.
  • Feb 7, 2018: Our work on the redwood genome is featured on the front page of the Washington Post.
  • Dec 2017: See Steven Salzberg’s talk on genome assembly at the Oxford Nanopore Community Meeting in NYC.
  • 31 Oct 2017: “Small group scoops international effort to sequence huge wheat genome.” This is us: read the story in Nature.
    Oct 2017. Re-released the Kraken! (v1.0 that is.) See ccb.jhu.edu/software/krakenfor details.
  • Sept 2017. Two new Ph.D. students join the lab, Alaina Shumate in the BME program, and Ales Varabyou in the CS program.
  • May 2017. Steven Salzberg publishes a paper refuting a recent claim that horizontal gene transfer is a widespread phenomenon in animal species.
  • July 2016. Steven Salzberg gives a keynote talk on open science at BOSC 2016. See the talk on YouTube.
  • June 2016. Steven Salzberg, Florian Breitwieser, and other scientists including Hopkins neurologist Carlos Pardo publish a landmark study on the use of sequencing to diagnose brain infections in critically ill patients.
  • May 2016. Former student Mike Schatz joins Hopkins as a Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science and Biology.
  • Feb. 2016. Daehwan Kim, Li Song and Florian Breitwieser release Centrifuge, a new metagenomics classifier.
  • December 2015. Steven Salzberg is named a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters, in the areas of both computer science and microbiology.
  • October 2015. Postdocs Daehwan Kim and Florian Breitwieser each give plenary talks at the 2015 Genome Informatics Conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
  • September 2015. Two new Ph.D. students join the lab: Jennifer Lu in Biomedical Engineering, and Rachel Sherman in Computer Science.
  • June 22, 2015. NIH awards a new 3-year grant to Steven Salzberg, Kathleen Barnes, and Alex Szalay for a new database to explore 1,000 genomes of African descent.
  • June 1, 2015. NSF awards a new 3-year research grant to Mihaela Pertea for her work on transcriptome reconstruction.
  • May 14, 2015. A consortium including 3 Salzberg lab members publishes a major new study of bee evolution in the journal Science.
  • Mar 30, 2015. Steven Salzberg is named as one of four new Bloomberg Distinguished Professors at Johns Hopkins University.
  • March 9, 2015. Daehwan Kim and colleagues publish HISAT, a highly efficient new method for alignment of RNA-seq reads, in Nature Methods.
  • Feb 23, 2015. Former Salzberg lab students Mike Schatz and Cole Trapnell are both selected as 2015 Sloan Research Fellows.
  • Feb 18, 2015. Ela Pertea and colleagues publish StringTie, a new method for assembly of RNA-seq data, in Nature Biotechnology.
  • Feb. 2, 2015. Florian Breitwieser joins the lab as a new postdoc.
  • Jan 2015. Computer Science Ph.D. student Rachel Coston joins the lab.
  • Sept. 2014. Postdoc Stefan Canzar departs for a new position as Research Assistant Professor at TTIC, Univ. of Chicago.