Welcome to The UMass Metabolic Network

Brent Stockwell, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences and a Professor at Columbia University. Through a series of landmark studies between 2003-2012, he discovered and characterized a new form of nonapoptotic cell death involving iron and lipid peroxidation, coining the term ‘ferroptosis.’  He is our first ever recipient of the MetNet Pioneer in Metabolism Award.

Cholsoon Jang, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. The Jang lab investigates metabolism from a whole organism perspective, uncovering both novel concepts such as inter-organ metabolic communication, while developing cutting edge organism-level metabolomics and in vivo isotope tracing technologies.

Donita Brady, is an Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. The Brady lab has made key discoveries into how metals such as copper play key roles as a modulator of signaling cascades in the context of normal physiology as well as in cancer. 

Baker was thrilled to participate in our December conference and celebration of the holidays.  Our conferences feature a variety of metabolic related topics with speakers from both in and out of the UMass system.  December's event included gflash talks form the MetNet community and some heavily oxygenated trivia. Baker provided a technology presentation focused on tools for ensuring physiologically relevant oxygen conditions in cell culture workflows.  

Kivanc Birsoy is an Associate Professor at The Rockefeller University.  Using unbiased genetic screens and omics approaches, the Birsoy lab has made numerous unexpected and important discoveries into how cancer cells reprogram their metabolic pathways, in particular as related to oxidative metabolism.

October's MetNet Battle for Metabolic Supremacy between mTORC1 and AMPK was one to remember.  Guest speakers Brendan Manning and Reuben Shaw pumped up the crowd and provided outstanding science.  In this video, Dave Guertin introduces them WWE style, with their own entrance music.  

Brendan Manning and Reuben Shaw will debate mTORC1 vs. AMPK in the Battle for Metabolic Supremacy in a MetNet showdown on October 12th.

Tigist Tamir is a Postdoctoral Associate in Forest White’s laboratory at MIT. Her scientific focus is to identify the convergence between cancer cell signaling and metabolism. She is currently applying techniques in proteomics, metabolomics, and computational modeling to study the processes that promote resistance to cancer therapy.

We welcome Søren Nielsen and Camilla Sheele from Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss fat and how it affects human metabolism.

Evanna Mills is an Assistant Professor of Cancer Immunology and Virology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Immunology at Harvard Medical School. She did her postdoctoral studies with Ed Chouchani at Dana Farber from 2017-22. Evanna’s independent lab is exploring how metabolites act as signaling molecules to regulate macrophage function during homeostasis and in chronic pathologies such as metabolic disease, chronic inflammatory disease, and cancer.

Will Mair is an Associate Professor at The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  He has utilized multiple model systems throughout hos career,  discovering links between key signaling pathways and aging in flies, worms, and mammals.  His lab has identified new links between the AMPK pathway, dietary restriction, and aging.  He has also opened new areas of aging research, identifying splicing regulators as modifiers of mTORC1. His lab continues to identify mechanisms harnessing the possibility of improving life and health span by manipulating nutrient sensing pathways.

Lynne Chantranupong is a postdoctoral fellow in the Bernardo Sabatini lab at Harvard Medical School.  She conducted her PhD studies in the David Sabatini lab at the Whitehead Institute where she investigated nutrient sensing mechanisms, uncovering several key regulators of the mTORC1 pathway that signal amino acid availability to the cell.  Her postdoctoral research is deducing how neurotransmitter interactions regulate behavior.  Lynne has developed a methodology for interrogating the metabolite contents of synaptic vesicles and discovered & characterized a novel dopamine and acetylcholine circuit in the striatum that is involved in decision making in vivo. 

James Olzmann is an Associate Professor at University of California, Berkeley.  James began his scientific training at University of Michigan where he obtained his B.S., then completed his PhD studies at Emory University.  He conducted postdoctoral research with Ron Kopito at Stanford, where he investigated the regulatory mechanisms and cellular roles of lipid droplets.  His independent laboratory has expanded his work on lipid droplets and lipid metabolism to investigate mechanisms of lipotoxic damage, including uncovering the role of lipid damage accumulation in ferroptosis.  We asked James to answer some random non-scientific questions.

The MetNet Immunometabolism Symposium speakers were asked to provide two truths and a lie about themselves. Can you identify the lies? The person who gets the most correct answers will win a UMass MetNet T-shirt. Good Luck!

We will kick off 2023 with an Immunometabolism Symposium on Thursday, January 26 at 1:00 PM in the Sherman Center Auditorium.  It will explore the world of immune cell metabolism and feature research taking place at UMass Chan Medical School.  A Keynote lecture by Dr. Lydia Lynch from Harvard Medical School will be followed by short talks from UMass Chan scientists and Agilent.  This blog post will introduce you to the speakers.

Marcia Haigis studies the role of mitochondrial metabolism in aging and disease at Harvard Medical School. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to do postdoctoral research at MIT in Leonard Guarente’s lab. Marcia will be our guest speaker December 15th as MetNet spends the month featuring mitochondrial biology.

Lawrence Kazak studies mechanisms of mitochondrial energetics in adipocytes and cancer cells at McGill University in Montreal.  He obtained his BA and MSc at York University in Toronto before completing his PhD studies in the Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge in England. His post-doctoral studies were at Harvard Medical School with Bruce Spiegelman, where he developed his current research program around thermogenic adipocytes.  We asked Lawrence to answer some science and non-science related questions. 

We asked the four researchers who will be speaking at our upcoming Nutrient Sensing Symposium to provide two truths and a lie about themselves. Can you identify the false statements? The person with the most correct guesses will win a MetNet t-shirt.

Our first “Fluxing Star” speaker is a postdoc in the Edward Chouchani lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.  Haopeng Xiao conducted his PhD studies at Georgia Institute of Technology where he developed and utilized novel mass spectrometry technologies for studying protein posttranslational modifications. He has developed a method to comprehensively map the mouse cysteine redox proteome in vivo during aging and established a network analysis approach that leverages genetic variations in outbred populations to define regulators of metabolic physiology. We asked Haopeng to answer random science and non-science questions.

Thursday, November 10th the MetNet will feature four UMass Chan researchers during a Nutrient Sensing Symposium taking us on a journey through mechanisms of nutrient sensing beginning at the level of individual proteins (Dr. Kuang Shen), through organelle nutrient sensing (Dr. Jessica Spinelli) to cellular nutrient sensing (Dr. Read Pukilla-Worley) and concluding with organism level sensing (Dr. Jin Zhang). Each will speak for 20 minutes. 

The Metabolog is the new official blog of the UMass Metabolic Network. This first blog post looks back at our five year history and the future goals of MetNet. Welcome!

The first MetNet speaker of the 2022-23 academic year is Richard Possemato, Associate Professor at New York University Langone Medical Center. He conducted his PhD studies on the process of cellular transformation with Dr. William Hahn at Harvard. His postdoctoral research was at Whitehead Institute with David Sabatini, where he developed genetic and continuous flow cell culture tools for studying cancer metabolism. Richard’s lab studies various aspects of cancer metabolism including mitochondrial iron sulfur cluster and serin metabolism. We asked Rich to answer random science and non-science related questions.