Aaron Neiman spent part of the academic year on sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.  There he worked on expanding the scope of his laboratory’s study of cell wall development in fungi by learning to work with the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus.  Aaron presented his lab’s work in seminars at the Institute Jacques Monod, the University of Groningen, and the University of Toronto.  He also spoke at international meetings on the Fungal Cell Wall and on Neuroacanthocytosis.  In addition to the studies of cell wall assembly, current projects in the lab include the regulation of RNA localization in controlling the developmental timing of gene expression and how defects in a membrane contact site protein leads to neurodegenerative disease in humans.  The people performing these studies are a research scientist, Jae-Sook Park, three graduate students, Reuben Hoffman, Liang Jin, and Sai Zhou, a Master’s student, Patrick Singer, and the lab technician, Kai Zhang.