• Lab pizza party at Chateau Andersen

    Lab pizza party at Chateau Andersen. Maiden voyage of the new pizza oven

  • First time on skis (Sundance 2022)

    First time on skis (Sundance 2022)

  • Christmas break lunch 2023

    Christmas break lunch 2023

  • Disneyworld AACR (Orlando 2023)

    Disneyworld AACR (Orlando 2023)

  • Ethiopian Restaurant (AACR 2023)

    Ethiopian Restaurant (AACR 2023)

  • Sampling Philly cheesesteaks

    Sampling Philly Cheesesteak (Experimental Biology, Philadelphia 2022)

  • (AACR 2023)

    Lab group (AACR 2023)

  • Dasun (AACR 2023)

    Dasun (AACR 2023)

  • Poster Session (Experimental Biology 2022)

    Poster Session (Experimental Biology 2022): Tania López-Palacios, Alec Vaughan, Josh Youngs, Dasun Jayatunge

  • Lunch a the Pie 2024

  • Lab holiday lunch 2024

  • Deshan with poster award, FASEB Kinase meeting, 2025

  • Bowling exclusion 2025

  • Tania speaking at FASEB 2025, Scottsdale, AZ

  • HCI founders week 2025

Recent Lab News

2026

  • Our funding from the Fritz B. Burns Foundation was renewed. We thank them for their critical support!

  • Tania successfully defended her PhD and joined the Dr. Birgit Knoechel’s laboratory (HCI) for her postdoctoral work

  • Tania’s manuscript on TNK1-driven pro-inflammatory signaling was accepted for publication in Genes & Development (scheduled for publication in September)

  • Dasun succesfully defended his PhD and plans to join Dr. Samuel Brady’s laboratory (St. Jude) for postdoctoral work

  • We welcomed Hannah Golding to our lab as a graduate student

  • Madelyn Tarara was accepted into the UofU Biochemistry PhD program

  • Sam Scott’s NSF pre-doctoral fellowship proposal on TNK1 regulation by LLPS was funded

  • Josh was promoted to full professor, although still a postdoc in his own mind :)

  • We welcomed Nurdic Adish to our lab as an undegraduate UROP fellow

  • We welcomed Nelson Pereira back to our lab as an undergraduate HCI Pathways fellow

2025

  • Our lab was awarded a 5-year R35 grant from the National Institutes of Health/NIGMS for work on PTMs/cellsignaling, understudied kinases, and autophagy.

  • We continued our critical partnership with the Fritz B. Burns Foundation with funding and research fellowships for students and lab personnel.

  • Tania López-Palacios received the Capecchi award for an outstanding poster presentation on TNK1 and blood cancer at the Western Blood Conference 2025.

  • Deshan Madhusanka received an award for an outstanding poster presentation on structure-function of the 14-3-3-TNK1 complex at the FASEB Protein Phosphorylation Conference 2025.

  • Tania was given a platform talk at the FASEB Protein Phosphorylation Conference to present her work on TNK1 function and therapeutic targeting.

  • Sam Scott was accepted into the UofU Molecular Biology PhD program.

  • We welcomed Madelyn Tarara and Paige Nelson as post-bac researchers in the lab.

  • Adam Miller (UVU), Rohit Singh (Johns Hopkins U), and Nelson Pereira (UofU) joined our lab for summer research internships.

2024

  • We received continued funding from the Fritz B. Burns Foundation. We thank them for their invaluable support and partnership!

  • Tania López-Palacios was honored with a graduate student Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). She will officially receive this award at the annual ASBMB 2024 conference where she will present her work on TNK1