In the past two years, we continued our NIH-funded research on cryo-EM structural biology. In Feb 2014, Huilin was invited to present a talk at a special cryo-EM symposium in Berkeley, California, in honor of his postdoctoral mentor Kenneth Downing, one of the pioneers in the field. In the same trip to the west coast, he gave a platform presentation on DNA replication at the 58th Annual Biophysics Society Meeting in San Francisco. In September 2014, Huilin co-chaired with Yifan Cheng at UCSF an international cryo-EM symposium and workshop in Shanghai, and witnessed very impressive advance of cryo-EM in particular and structural biology in general in China. In September 2015, Huilin presented a platform talk at the biannual CSHL meeting on Eukaryotic DNA Replication & Genome Maintenance. In the summer this year, Huilin is invited to present at the 3DEM Gordon Research Conference to be held first time ever in Asia (Hong Kong). He is also invited to present at another cryo-EM symposium in Beijing in the summer. Over the past year or so, he also gave departmental seminars at Ohio State University (Aug 2014), University of Colorado Denver (Jan 2015), Purdue University (Feb 2015), and University of Georgia Athens (Feb 2016).

Several people joined our lab recently. Ruda Santos is a graduate student in the BSB program. He is funded by a Brazil government scholarship. Ping Zhu joined us this year as a postdoctoral fellow, funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council. In September 2015, Kuan Hu, a fourth year graduate student in the BSB program, won Dr. Mow Lin Scholarship at BNL, for his outstanding thesis work on a novel Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteasome activator (Proc Nat Acad Sci 2016 in print). Additional lab members include undergraduate student Olivia Jie Hu, Ph.D. students Samema Sarowar and Zuanning Yuan, postdoctoral scholars Lin Bai and Hongjun Yu, and research scientists Hao-Chi Hsu and Jingchuan Sun.