News

Just wanted to shout out our new undergrads, Amere Tucker and Mo’asia Bagley, and say how much we appreciate the work you guys do. These lovely ladies joined our lab at the the beginning of the semester 2025 and they have been a huge help around the lab. The girls have been mostly doing maintenance work at the moment to get them familiar with the lab items, equipment and layout. Super proud of how quickly they’ve picked up on lab techniques. We’ll be transition to more wet work at the bench soon! Stay tuned to hear about their progress.

#LoveourUndergrads

Big shout out to our summer undergrad, Alexia Horton, for doing such a good job on her project. Alexia is part of the CUREP program which matches undergraduate students from nearby universities to labs here at UNC. Alexia is a rising senior at North Carolina Central University studying Biology. For the last few weeks Alexia has been working with our awesome graduate student, Skylar Grimsley, on a variant of ABCA7 called T319A. She learned about the properties of ABCA7 as a lipid transport protein, it’s connection to Alzheimer’s disease and the impact that changing an amino acid has on a protein’s function. Super proud of you, Alexia!

 

Learn more about CUREP and how to get connected to labs doing interesting science:

 

 

Dr. Chrystal Starbird was recently selected to join the 2025 class of Keystone Fellows, and appointed to the editorial advisory board for ACS Bio and Med Chem Au and as Chair of the Board for the Life Science Editors Foundation. Check out these stellar people in the link provided!

(https://keypoint.keystonesymposia.org/home/keypoint-newsletter-introducing-the-new-fellows-class-of-2025)

Dr. Starbird was featured in the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences blog, Biomedical Beat. The piece highlighted her NIGMS funded work along with information about her background. You can check out her Q&A session at the home NIH NIGMS home page HERE

The Starbird lab is ecstatic to announce that Skylar Grimsley has successfully completed her Oral Qualifications and is now a PhD CANDIDATE. What a rock star !!

We look forward to seeing the future Dr. Grimsley do amazing things 😉