What’s New with BB
(October 1, 2025 through December 31, 2025)

Dear BB Community,

Happy New Year! We wrapped up a busy Fall term with perfectly polished rotation talks and a delightful holiday lunch that brought the BB community together for good science and good food. Thank you to everyone who attended, brought food, offered feedback, and mentored and cheered on our first-year graduate students in conducting and presenting their research this Fall.

As I reflect on 2025, I search for rays of sunshine in what has been a very dark year. There were bright moments: we celebrated undergraduates earning the highest honors with Fulbright and Marshall scholarships, applauded graduate students reaching the finish line, secured major grants, welcomed new members to our community, and received prestigious awards -including the OSU Loyal Philanthropic Partner Award to Kari van Zee. I also had the honor of delivering the Gilfillan Public Lecture. Yet, it is impossible to ignore that 2025 stands out as one of the most challenging years in the history of American science marked by deep funding cuts, halted and delayed reviews due to government shutdown, restrictions on the international talent, and attacks on diversity and freedom of speech.

On a personal level, this year brought profound loss and pain. Losing a mother is one of the deepest sorrows a heart can know, and I have never known this much pain. My mom was smart as a whip and full of life and wisdom and the cornerstone of our family. She had so much love and vitality left to give. She was a woman of unmatched resilience, courage, generosity, and compassion. She was a role model—far ahead of her time—for superwomen who balance careers, raise large families, and hold generations together. Her parting words “I will live through you. Do good in the world” is the reason I still get up every morning and welcome a new day with optimism.

Both my parents were heroes. After enduring years of hardship during the Lebanese civil war, they made the courageous decision to leave Lebanon and start over in a new land, embracing an unfamiliar culture and leaving behind friends, respected careers, and family. They took a big leap of faith into the unknown, so they stay close to their children and keep our family together. As dedicated teachers, they viewed education as a calling and worked with the premise that education changes lives and gives hope. Losing them both within a year is a pain very hard to bear. In honor of their memory—and the memory of all the loved ones the BB community has lost—we continue our mission and look forward to brighter days ahead.

I hope 2026 brings joy to all of us, or at least equip us with the resilience to find joy in small victories. Every proposal that is submitted in this climate is a victory. Every paper we submit and is accepted is a victory. Every student we mentor to completion and success is a victory.

Below I list some of our activities and successes, and the many submitted proposals, compiled by Kimberly. Enjoy reading and keep up the good work.

Funded Grants

Jessica Siegel received an Ecampus Research Fellows Grant to examine the use of Learning Assistants in online Ecampus courses.
Dan Liefwalker received $50,000 in funding from the Medical Research Foundation.

Grant Proposals Submitted

Elisar Barbar with Siva Kolluri as lead PI submitted a proposal to the NIH titled “Bcl-2 as a

target in breast cancer” for $2,906,241.

Elisar Barbar submitted to the NSF a proposal titled “Regulation of dynamic protein complexes in vitro and in cellular machines” for $1,182,553.

Myriam Cotten submitted a USDA research proposal titled “Development of a Scalable Supercritical Co2 Method for Isolating Milk Extracellular Vesicles to Enhance Essential Amino Acids Delivery” as Co-PI for $650,000.

Myriam Cotten submitted an Agricultural Research Foundation proposal titled “From Ocean to Organ: Scalable Biomanufacturing of Seaweed-Derived Scaffolds for Regenerative Applications” as Co-PI for $15,000.

Nathan Mortimer submitted an R01 titled “The impact of amyloid aggregation state on neuroinflammation in a Drosophila model of Alzheimer’s disease” to the NIA for $2,785,200.

Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer as lead PI and Nathan Mortimer submitted to the NIH a proposal titled “A new model of parental age and offspring health” of the amount of $388,190.

Fritz Gombart submitted an R01 proposal titled, “AMPing-Up Bone: Positive Impact of Antimicrobial Peptides on Bone & Healing” as Co-PI to NIAMS at the NIH for $3,655,113.

Dan Liefwalker submitted a proposal for the NIH MIRA R35 for $1,996,941.
Dan Liefwalker submitted a proposal for the American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award for $946,000.

Jenna Beyer (Mehl Lab) submitted a postdoc fellowship application to the to the Life Sciences Research Foundation titled “Decoding Protein Kinase A Signaling via Genetic Encoding of Non- Hydrolyzable Phosphoserine” for $255,000.

Jenna Beyer (Mehl Lab) submitted a postdoc fellowship application to the NIH titled “Resolving cardiac Protein Kinase A signaling via genetic encoding of a stable phosphoserine analog in mammalian cells” for $228,612.

Tilo Chatterjee (Liefwalker Lab) submitted a postdoc fellowship proposal to the American Cancer Society titled: “How epigenetics influences metabolic reprogramming in cancer: Exploring the roles played by MYC and ATP-citrate lyase” for $217,500.

Sanjay Ramprasad (Hendrix Lab) submitted a postdoc fellowship proposal to Simons Foundation, titled “Decoding How Circular RNA Structure and Topology Drive Pathogenicity in Minimal Plant Pathogens” for $360,000.

Professional Service
Nathan Mortimer served on the scientific review board for the Oregon Partnership for Alzheimer’s Research and reviewed funding proposal letters of intent.

Ryan Mehl was one of the organizers of the OHSU Chemical Biology and Physiology Conference, December 11-13th, 2025 in Portland, OR.

Publications

From the Barbar Group
Walker DR, Barbar EJ. (2025) Multifaceted multivalency with a hub protein. FEBS J. 2025

Nov 5. doi: 10.1111/febs.70320. Online ahead of print. From the Hendrix Group

Pratt AA, Hendrix DA. Unraveling Unbreakable Hairpins: Characterizing RNA secondary structures that are persistent after dinucleotide shuffling. RNA. 2025 Jul 1;31(7):885-95.

Lin LW, Jang HS, Song Z, Ebrahimi A, Yang J, Nguyen BD, O’Donnell EF, Hendrix DA, Maier CS, Kolluri SK. Suppression of global protein synthesis and hepatocellular carcinoma cell growth by Benzimidazoisoquinoline, 4, 11-Dichloro-BBQ. Biochemical Pharmacology. 2025 Jun 1;236:116896.

Lasher B, Hendrix DA. bpRNA-CosMoS: a robust and efficient RNA structural comparison method using k-mer based cosine similarity. Bioinformatics. 2025 Apr;41(4):btaf108.

Wu, L.F., Zhang, J., Cornwell‐Arquitt, R., Hendrix, D.A., Radakovic, A. and Szostak, J.W., 2025. Selective nonenzymatic formation of biologically common RNA hairpins. Angewandte Chemie, 137(5), p.e202417370.

From the Mehl and Cooley Groups

Saleh, IG, Shimogawa, M, Ramirez, J, Abakah, B, Venkatesh, Y, Priya James, H, Li, M, Louie, SA, Lougee, MG, Chia, W, Cooley, RB, Mehl, RA, Baumgart, T, Mach, RH, Eliezer, D, Rhoades, E, Petersson, EJ. Genetic Code Expansion and Enzymatic Modifications as Accessible Methods for Studying Site-Specific Post-Translational Modifications of Alpha-Synuclein and Tau. Protein Science. 2025 Oct;34(10):e70302. doi: 10.1002/pro.70302 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40944447/

Faculty Talks

Elisar Barbar gave a talk titled “The BPTI story: From the slow exchange core to intrinsically disordered proteins”, as part of Celebrating Professor George Barany’s Half Century in Science webinar. A link to the webinar is
here: https://cassyni.com/events/F2EkSC3wvbb3MCUpxXv2QV

Elisar Barbar and Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer both gave talks as part of the Murdock Site Visit, organized by Jessica Siegel.

Sarah Clark gave two talks:

Eye on the Cure Cohen Syndrome Research Foundation Symposium in Los Angeles, CA,

titled: “Strategies for structural studies of VPS13B.”

CryoEM Current Practices Webinar Series, online seminar titled: “Architecture of a

bridge-like lipid transfer protein."

Myriam Cotten gave two talks at PacifiChem Conference on December 16th, 2025 in Honolulu, HI:

“Leveraging 17O Solid-state NMR to Investigate the Interactions of Functionally- important Water Molecules with Membrane-interacting Peptides”

“Investigating Synergistic Antimicrobial and Anticancer Effects Based on Membrane- active Peptides”

Ryan Mehl gave an invited seminar talk titled “The chemical limits of labeling proteins using genetic code expansion” at UCSD.

Ryan Mehl gave an invited platform talk, “Artificial intelligence-assisted design of a tRNA synthetase for genetic code expansion” at the PacifiChem Conference on December 16th, 2025 in Honolulu, HI.

Teaching and Learning News

Students in BB 315: Molecular Biology Laboratory spent the term diving into hands-on research using Drosophila melanogaster, as a powerful model for understanding neurodegeneration. Their challenge was to track down an unknown mutation tied to a neurodegenerative phenotype and figure out what’s going on at the molecular level.

• Stanislau Stanisheuski – “Cell-to-cell proteome changes induced by Bcl-2- overexpression in single TNBC-cells”
• Jenna Beyer – “Development of a next-generation GCE tool for stable phosphorylation in mammalian cells”
• Alex Eddins – “Surpassing the Boundaries of Mammalian Genetic Code Expansion: A Modular GCE Platform for Building Tailored and Optimized Stable Cell Lines”
• Cat Vesely – “PINBody: an inclusion body strategy for production of unmodified and phosphorylated intrinsically disordered proteins for mechanistic and structural studies”
• Sarah McGee – “Unveiling the Relationships between Nitration and Phosphorylation Using Genetic Code Expansion”
• Sarah Louie – “Building a more versatile genetic code expansion system for encoding phosphor-Threonine”
• Patrick Allen – Aminoacyl-Based Affinity Purification Enables Mapping of Host-Driven Modifications on Functional tRNAs for Genetic Code Expansion”
• Nathan Palazzolo – “Reliable Dual Encoding Systems for Genetic Encoding of Noncanonical Amino Acids”

GCE News

The International GCE Webinar series will begin again soon! See our upcoming schedule and register for future webinars here.

Recruitment News

The graduate committee interviewed the top 18 candidates for admission to the BB PhD program beginning Fall 2026 and invited them to a recruitment weekend! We look forward to meeting the applicants January 22nd-24th, and we hope you join us to welcome them to Corvallis and to OSU!

Grad Specific News

Cat Hoang Vesely (Cooley Lab) successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis titled “A Matter of Life and Death: Dissecting BAD Activation with Genetic Code Expansion” on December 4th. Congratulations, Dr. Vesely!

Alumni News

Douglas Walker (Barbar Lab) received a $500 travel award from the Biophysical Society.

New Addition to the BB Family

Congratulations to Jessica Siegel and family on their new addition!! Kyël was born on 11/10,

coming in at 7 lbs and 14 oz with a full head of spiky black hair.

From the BPS Student Chapter

The BPS Student Chapter hosted a Trivia Night on December 9th, with fun snacks and prizes! Thank you to all who attended.

The BPS Student Chapter will continue to host our weekly Biophysics Journal Club, organized by Hannah Long, and will be back on Fridays at 9am in ALS 2009A. The list of presenters is below. We hope you’ll join us!

Upcoming Events

January

1: New Years Day, University Closed
5: First day of Winter Term classes
7: BB Student Talks: Ethan Beffert (Liefwalker Lab) and Sarah Louie (Cooley Lab) 9: Faculty Meeting, 3-5 PM
13: Tuesday Lunch
14: Seminar speaker Dr. Patrick Philips, University of Oregon
19: Martin Luther King Jr Day, University Closed
21: Seminar speaker Dr. Marina Guenza, University of Oregon
23: Grad recruiting day
27: Tuesday Lunch
28: Seminar speaker Dr. Peter Hsu, Genentech

February

4: BB Graduate Student Hannah Long 3rd year talk
6: Winter Rotation Talks #1, 3 PM
10: Tuesday Lunch
11: BB Student Talks: Nolan Herron (Vanegas Lab) and Tepary Cooley (Purice Lab)
13: Faculty Meeting
18: Seminar speaker Dr. Binata Joddar, Oregon State University
20: BB Student Talks: Tilo Chatterjee (Liefwalker Lab) and Nadia Gonzalez (Vrailas-Mortimer Lab)
24: Tuesday Lunch
25: BB Graduate Student Joline Nguyen 3rd year talk

March

4: BB Seminar speaker Dr. Sriram Subramaniam, University of British Columbia
10: Tuesday Lunch
11: BB Seminar speaker Dr. Bob Eisenman, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 13: Faculty Meeting
17: COS Inclusive Excellence Award Talk – Hannah Stuwe
18: BB Seminar speaker Dr. Ben Youngblood, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital 20: Winter Rotation Talks #2
23-27: Spring Break

*Please note that our Wednesday seminar space has changed to ALS 4000*

Thank you for reading this far, and we will catch up again at the beginning of Spring 2026. Please let Kimberly know if your event/activity was not included so we add it in the next issue. Have a great Winter term!

Elisar