Lab News
7-December-2023
Dingal Lab at Cell Bio 23
Congratulations to Mustafa Alrawi, Nitin Chikkodi and Dr. Dingal for representing Dingal Lab at Cell Bio 23 in Boston, MA! Cell Bio 23 is an international conference organized jointly by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
9-November-2023
Dingal Lab Makes Headlines
Dingal Lab’s newly published project studying the signaling protein Vg1 using Synthetic Processing (SynPro) made university headlines. Read the news article here and the original paper here.
7-November-2023
Dingal Lab Grad Student Now PhD Candidate
Congratulations to lab member Medel Lim Suan Jr. for passing his Qualifying Exams and becoming an official PhD candidate!
3-November–2023
BMEN Undergraduate Poster Competition
Congratulations to lab member Jaideep Kaur for representing Dingal Lab at the 8th Annual BMEN Undergraduate Poster Competition! Jaideep’s project was “Development of a Novel Protease to Cleave Amyloid-Beta.” The top three posters will be awarded the opportunity to submit and present their research at the 2024 National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR).
15-October-2023
BMES Annual Conference
Congratulations to lab members Mustafa Alrawi and Nitin Chikkodi for representing Dingal Lab at the 2023 Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting! They presented their project, “A novel optogenetic split-enzyme system to control protein-protein interactions in the secretory compartments of cells,” from October 11th-14th in Seattle, WA.
1-August-2023
Dr. Dingal Awarded NIH MIRA Award
Congratulations to Dr. Dingal for receiving the prestigious Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of Health! This award will provide the Dingal Lab with over $1.8 million over the next 5 years.
28-July-2023
Office of Provost Award – UTD SPUR Symposium
Congratulations to lab members Precious Castillo, Medel Lim Suan Jr., Zain Syed, Ajay Tunikipati, Jai Nagineni, Rodrigo Raposo! They received the Office of Provost Award at the annual Summer Platform for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) Symposium for their project “ChaChaCha: Live-Cell Fluorescent Sensors to Measure Activation of G-Protein Coupled Receptors.”
16-June-2023
Dingal and Meloni Labs were selected for the SPiRe Award
A collaborative project with the Meloni Lab has been selected for the Seed Program for Interdisciplinary Research (SPiRe) award of $60,000! This seed grant will help develop the project: Rational design and evaluation of new proteases targeting amyloid beta. Team SynPro will spearhead this exciting project!
19-May-2023
B.E. Researcher Award | B.E. STARS Program
Congratulations to lab members, Jaideep Kaur and Precious Castillo! Jaideep has obtained the Bioengineering Researcher Award for Fall 2023, for the second time! Jaideep and Precious have also joined the Bioengineering Summer Training and Research Scholars (B.E. STARS) program for the Summer. Looking forward to do fun and amazing science in the lab!
15-May-2023
Lab Social: Rock Climbing at Movement The Hill
We had our End-of-Spring Semester Social at Movement The Hill! The lab celebrated all the hard work during the past semester by bouldering crazy routes. Looking forward to what the Summer holds!
2-May-2023
Undergraduates on the way
Giulietta, Saif, Pia, Precious, and Mindy will be joining the lab starting this Summer!
1-May-2023
Dingal Lab and Morcos Lab awarded the NFRS Award
In collaboration with the Morcos Lab at UTD, the Dingal Lab obtained the New Faculty Research Symposium (NFRS) seed grant of $25,000 as a result of Team ChaChaCha’s cloning and transfection efforts! This funding will be directed towards the project: Experimental and Predictive Models to Determine Protease Specificity.
17-Jan-2023
Undergraduates join the lab
Adam, Nashrah, Jai, and Rodrigo joined the lab this semester!
09-Nov-2022
Dave wins the ECS Faculty 3MT competition
The annual clash between Electrical Engineering vs. Mechanical Engineering vs. Bioengineering! Dave presented his thesis at the Faculty 3 Minute Thesis Competition in the TI auditorium, along with 9 other faculty members in this annual School-wide competition. Dave is the overall ECS 3MT winner, and the Bioengineering Team (with Dr. Shashank Sirsi and Dr. Leo Bleris) won the Department trophy!
04-Nov-2022
Jaideep presents at 7th annual BMEN poster presentation
Jaideep presented her exciting research at the 7th annual undergraduate poster competition on her work on developing novel proteases.
21-Oct-2022
Dave wins at the annual University Faculty 3MT competition
At the annual Faculty Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition faculty competition, Dave won first prize and a trophy to boot!
15-Oct-2022
Lab outreach with the Urban STEM PopUp program
The Dingal lab collaborated with the Urban STEM PopUp program and showed young African-Americans in Grades 4-9 how zebrafish is used to study how animals develop from a single cell.
12-Oct-2022
Dave presents at UTD’s Center for Systems Biology
Dave presented his lab’s research at the Center for Systems Biology. CSB is a group of enthusiastic researchers focusing on the development of computational and experimental methods aimed at solving challenges facing biologists from a systems perspective.
28-Sep-2022
TACC Symposium
Dave and Medel presented their posters at the annual Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) symposium at UT Austin. This symposium is a place where scholars, engineers and students in TX that utilized the TACC system come to meet and share how they have utilized the computational tools for their research. Dave and Medel how they used the Alphafold system to model synthetic enzymes and developmental signaling proteins.
26-Sep-2022
Jaideep awarded B.E. Researcher Award
The Department of Bioengineering awarded Jaideep the highly competitive B.E. Researcher Award. Congratulations, Jaideep!
19-Sep-2022
Biology sophomore, Ajay Tunikipati, joins the lab
Glad to have you with us, Ajay!
22-Aug-2022
Undergraduates join the lab
Welcome to the lab, Mustafa Alrawi and Nitin Chikkodi!
29-July-2022
Team SynPro and Team ChaChaCha present at SPUR
Team SynPro (Leah, Jaideep, Milcah and Zain) and Team ChaChaCha (Abeni, Anbarin and Oreoluwa) present at the Summer Platform for Undergraduate Research (SPUR). Team Synpro showcased the synthetic proteases they are developing, and Team ChaChaCha is developing fluorescent reporters for receptor signaling.
21-Jun-2022
Zebrafish workshop in the Future Comets Program
Dr. Dingal and Leah had a blast introducing zebrafish to future Comets and showed them how to use a stereomicroscope to observe live zebrafish embryos and larvae. If you are a rising 8th or 9th grader in the area, you can be a future Comet: https://community.utdallas.edu/college-preparation-programs/future-comets-program/
29-May-2022
Our first Clark Summer Scholar, Leah, joins the lab
Leah Sullivan is an incoming first-year who wants to get an early headstart in hands-on research experience. If you are an incoming first-year student, consider joining the summer program: https://honors.utdallas.edu/clark-summer-research-program
26-May-2022
Undergraduates join the lab
Zain Syed and Abeni Belay have safely finished the safety training and raring to join the team. Welcome, Zain and Abeni!
11-May-2022
Invited talk at the Zebrafish Summer Institute
Every summer, the inspiring Dr. Vinita Hajeri hosts K-12 teachers on campus to learn how to incorporate zebrafish research into their classrooms. Dr. Dingal had the wonderful opportunity to share his research on early zebrafish embryonic signaling with the teachers! More info about the summer program here: https://labs.utdallas.edu/hajeri/professional-development/
22-Apr-2022
BMEN Department Seminar: Natural and Synthetic Mechanisms of Ligand Formation
Dave presented past work and future plans for the Dingal Lab on Biological Signal Processing. Thanks to a promised bonus credit for a BMEN7000 course, graduate students did not shy away from asking great questions!
13-Apr-2022
Invited seminar at UTSW
Dave was invited to give a talk at the Biomechanics Interest Group (BIG) twice-monthly meeting at UT Southwestern. He presented his postdoc work at Harvard on Vg1-Nodal signaling; unbeknownst to him, one of the faculty was a postdoc at the Harvard lab that discovered Vg1!
6-Apr-2022
Medel awarded a Eugene McDermott Graduate Fellowship
Out of ~1500 incoming PhD students at UTD, Medel is one of only 15 awarded the four-year fellowship. We cannot wait for our PCR master, Medel, to do amazing science in the lab!
25-Jan-2022
BME Undergraduates join the lab
Anbarin Khalid, Jaideep Kaur, Milcah Taye, and Oreoluwa Adegoke are excited to join the lab and help set it up. Welcome, y’all!
13-Jan-2022
The Dingal Lab opens!
Weeks after missing a midnight tornado sighting in Tennessee, Dave finally made it to UT Dallas to start stocking his lab with supply chain-limited reagents and equipment!