Lily Lei, third-year Biology student, and Mitchell Thomas, third-year BME student were awarded the Harrison Undergraduate Research Award. This award is given to only 40 undergraduate students around the university every year. They are the 8th and 9th undergraduate students in the Civelek Lab to win this award. Congratulations to Lily and Mitch.
The paper entitled “Genetic Regulation of SMC Gene Expression and Splicing Predict Causal CAD Genes” was published in American Heart Association’s journal, Circulation Research. You can see the news about this paper on CBS19.
Leducq Foundation awarded an International Networks of Excellence grant to a team of seven scientists led by Dr. Mete Civelek at UVA and Dr. Hester den Ruijter at University Medical Center Utrecht. The network is named AtheroGEN: Identification and targeting of sex-specific mechanisms of atherosclerosis. In addition to the Civelek and den Ruijter labs, it consists of the laboratories of Karen Reue at UCLA, Lola Eniola-Adefeso at the University of Michigan, Jeanette Erdmann at the University of Luebeck, Johan Bjorkegren at the Karolinska Institute, and Ulf Landmesser at Charite Berlin. Dr. David Milan, the Chief Scientific Officer of the Leducq Foundation, paid a visit to UVA to celebrate the award with Civelek Lab members.
Civelek and Saucerman Labs’ collaboration entitled “Have yourself a murine little Christmas” won the annual BME Gingerbread House Competition!
Civelek Lab has a new grant (R01HL166428) entitled “Systems Genetics of Vascular Smooth Muscle Phenotypes” from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Insitute.
The immunology, imaging, and informatics in precision immunomedicine (iPRIME) initiative awarded a 2-year pilot grant to Dr. Civelek and Dr. Patricia Rodriguez Lozano, Director of Women’s Heart Health Program at UVA, to study the impact of sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors on systemic inflammation in women with coronary microvascular disease.
The paper is entitled “Genetic regulation of circular RNA expression in human aortic smooth muscle cells and vascular traits” and was published in the American Society of Human Genetics Journal HGG Advances. His co-first author, Dillon Lue, was an undergraduate research student in the Civelek Lab for four years. He is now a PhD student in Computer Science at Princeton University.
Drs. Civelek, Abebayehu, and Sheybani of the Department of Biomedical Engineering organized the inaugural Emerging Leaders in Biomedical Engineering symposium with grant support on increasing faculty diversity from the Provost’s Office.
