October 2024

Time to say goodbye.  This month we are saying goodbye and good luck to several lab members.  Dr. Yunping Lei, who joined our group in 2010 and led our team’s efforts in genomic studies and mutational analyses for neural tube defects, has taken a faculty position at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine.  Dr. Lei had great success in obtaining NIH research funding and was a co-author on 50 publications with the lab members. His many notable contributions included the identification of the CIC gene as a risk factor for the Cerebral Folate Deficiency Syndrome. We hope to continue to collaborate with Dr. Lei once he sets up his laboratory in Shanghai.  We also bid farewell to Dr. John Steele, who was a former graduate student of Dr. Finnell who worked his way up the ranks to that of a junior faculty member (Instructor) at Baylor College of Medicine.  Dr. Steele has moved on to a position as a research analyst with the US Food and Drug Administration. During his time with us, John  was the author or co-author of 15 publications, with an interest on the impact of anti-seizure medications on pregnancy outcomes as well as the role of folates and one carbon metabolism in neural tube closure defects. Finally, we are saying goodbye to Ms. Paula Pimienta Ramirez, who got married this past July and has moved on to Austin, Texas to continue her research career.  We are sad to see Paula leave us, as she was the primary technician for the DNA short read sequencing core under the direction of Dr. Lei.  She also helped out in multiple research projects.