September 2024Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk as part of the Biological Division seminar series in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University.
September 2024Dr. Lakin and Dr. Sarika Kumar's paper on geometric reaction enumeration of tethered DNA reaction networks is published in the proceedings of the 30th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA30). Dr. Lakin presents the work at the conference, held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, USA.
September 2024Dr. Lakin is co-editor of the special issue of journal papers from the DNA27 conference, now published in Natural Computing.
August 2024A new graduate student, Jasmine Charley, joins the group. Welcome!
August 2024Dr. Lakin is PI of a newly awarded pilot grant from UNM Rainforest Innovations on controlling cellular behavior using heterochiral DNAzymes.
July 2024A new undergraduate student, Abigail Carlson, joins the group. Welcome!
July 2024The third iteration of our NSF CAREER-funded biotechnology summer camp concludes! Two groups of high-school students from the Albuquerque area and a group of students recruited from across the country by the Air Force Research Lab each spent five days at ¡Explora! where they carried out experiments including cell-free expression of fluorescent proteins, agar art, and CRISPR interference reactions!
July 2024Dr. Lakin is promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the UNM Department of Computer Science.
May 2024Dr. Lakin is a co-author on a paper on nucleic acid isolation using intrinsically disordered proteins, now published in Scientific Reports.
February 2024A new graduate student, Anshika Mishra, joins the group. Welcome!
February 2024Dr. Tracy Mallette's paper on transfection of heterochiral DNA circuit components into living human cells is published in ChemBioChem. Congratulations!
January 2024Dr. Lakin is a co-author on a perspective piece on genetic biocontainment, now published in Nature Communications.
November 2023Dr. Sarika Kumar's paper on geometric reaction enumeration is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Congratulations!
October 2023Dr. Lakin is PI of a newly awarded grant: NSF grant 2312215: Simulation-guided design of heterochiral DNA nanostructures for biomaterials applications.
September 2023Dr. Tracy Mallette presents a poster on her work on heterochiral DNA computing in living mammalian cells at the 29th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming at Tohoku University, Japan.
August 2023Dr. Lakin's new grant on heavy metal biosensing is featured on the UNM Newsroom website.
August 2023Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk at the Pittsposium workshop held at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, in honor of the retirement of Prof. Andrew Pitts.
August 2023Dr. Lakin is Co-PI of a newly awarded grant: NSF grant 2318897: Biosensors for field detection of aqueous heavy metals: a collaboration with Native American communities. This $3,000,000 project is a collaboration with the UNM Center for Water and the Environment, the Southwest Research and Information Center, and Navajo Technical University.
July 2023Sarika Kumar has successfully defended her PhD dissertation for the Computer Science program, entitled "Computational Study of the Effect of Geometry on Molecular Interactions." Congratulations Dr. Kumar!
July 2023The second iteration of our NSF CAREER-funded biotechnology summer camp concludes! Two groups of high-school students from the Albuquerque area each spent five days at ¡Explora! working with Lakin Lab members carrying out activities and assays including cell-free expression reactions, bacterial transformations, and CRISPR interference experiments!
July 2023Dr. Lakin's perspective piece on the computational design of nucleic acid circuits is published, as part of the "Visions of DNA Nanotechnology at 40 for the Next 40" book, in honor of the late Prof. Ned Seeman.
June 2023A new graduate student, Andrew Gutierrez, joins the group. Welcome!
May 2023Dr. Lakin gives a talk and presents a poster at the SynCell 2023 conference at the University of Minnesota.
May 2023Tracy Mallette has successfully defended her PhD dissertation for the Biomedical Engineering program, entitled "Heterochiral DNA Nanotechnology for Biomedical Applications." She passed the defense with distinction. Congratulations Dr. Mallette!
May 2023Tracy Mallette wins the UNM School of Engineering's Outstanding Graduate Student Award for the combined Interdisciplinary Programs (Biomedical Engineering, Nanoscience & Microsystems Engineering, and Optical Science & Engineering). Congratulations!
April 2023Dr. Lakin's paper on a backpropagation learning chemical reaction network is published online in Artificial Life.
November 2022David Arredondo's paper on conditioning of chemical reaction networks is published online in PLOS Computational Biology. Congratulations!
October 2022Tracy Mallette wins a Poster Award at the 18th Annual Meeting of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society. Congratulations!
August 2022Tracy Mallette is voted 1st runner-up for the DNA28 Best Student Presentation Award for her talk entitled "Protecting heterochiral DNA nanostructures against exonuclease-mediated degradation." Congratulations!
August 2022The 28th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA28) is hosted at UNM by Dr. Lakin and Prof. Darko Stefanovic. The conference attracted 124 participants from 46 institutions in 12 countries to a fully in-person event held over 5 days. There were 5 invited keynote talks, including the Tulip Award keynote talk delivered by Dr. Andrew Phillips, as well as 31 contributed talks, 47 poster presentations, and a special tribute session in honor of the late Prof. Ned Seeman.
June 2022The first iteration of our NSF CAREER-funded biotechnology summer camp concludes! High-school students from the Albuquerque area spent four days at ¡Explora! working with Lakin Lab members carrying out activities and assays including cell-free expression reactions, gel electrophoresis, and CRISPR interference experiments!
June 2022Tracy Mallette's paper on using L-DNA to protect molecular circuits from degradation is published online in ACS Synthetic Biology. Congratulations!
May 2022David Arredondo gives a speech at the UNM School of Engineering's Spring 2022 Convocation.
May 2022David Arredondo has successfully defended his PhD dissertation for the Nanoscience & Microsystems Engineering program, entitled "Control Mechanisms for Adaptive Nanoscale Devices." He passed the defense with distinction. Congratulations Dr. Arredondo!
May 2022Dr. Lakin is featured on the UNM School of Engineering Faculty Highlights webpage.
February 2022Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk as part of the University of Minnesota's ECE colloquium talk series.
February 2022David Arredondo's paper on supervised learning in chemical neural networks is published online in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. Congratulations!
January 2022Dr. Lakin is Co-PI of a newly awarded grant to support the DNA28 conference: NSF grant 2202396: Student and Postdoc Travel Support for DNA28.
January 2022Dr. Lakin is a local organizer for the 28th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (DNA28), scheduled to be held at UNM on August 8-12, 2022!
December 2021David Arredondo's paper on implementing finite state automata using approximate majority reactions is published online in Royal Society Open Science. Congratulations!
December 2021Dr. Lakin is a co-author on a perspective piece arising from the SynCell2020/2021 conferences, now published online in eLife.
December 2021Group member Luis Paez graduates from UNM with a B.S. degree in Biochemistry, and with a minor in Statistics. Congratulations!
November 2021Dr. Caroline Rempe joins the group as a technical staff member working on outreach projects. Welcome!
November 2021Tracy Mallette won second place in the LoboBITES competition at the UNM Shared Knowledge Conference. Congratulations!
September 2021Dr. Lakin is co-editor of the proceedings of the DNA27 conference, now available online.
August 2021Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk as part of the Build-A-Cell virtual seminar series.
August 2021A new undergraduate student, Sameen Jawadi, joins the group. Welcome!
August 2021Dr. Lakin is Co-PI of a newly awarded grant: NSF grant 2124308: Toward lifelike synthetic cells via engineered control of DNA replication.
August 2021Dr. Lakin's book chapter on applications of DNAzymes in nanotechnology is published by Wiley.
July 2021Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk at the Synthetic Approaches to Biology and Artificial Intelligence (SB-AI) workshop, a satellite workshop of the 2021 ALIFE conference.
July 2021Dr. Lakin is Co-PI of a newly awarded grant: NSF grant 2123465: Synthetic P-bodies: Coupling gene expression and ribonucleoprotein granules in synthetic cell vesicles for sensing and response.
June 2021Sarika Kumar's paper on structure sampling for tethered DNA nanostructures is published online in Scientific Reports. Congratulations!
May 2021Dr. Lakin gives an invited talk at the 2021 International Conference on Engineering Synthetic Cells and Organelles.
May 2021Dr. Lakin receives the UNM School of Engineering Junior Faculty Research Excellence award!
March 2021Dr. Lakin's NSF CAREER award is featured on the UNM Newsroom website.
January 2021Dr. Lakin receives the NSF CAREER award! He is the PI of NSF grant 2044838: CAREER: Robust heterochiral molecular computing in mammalian cells. See the project website for more.
January 2021David Arredondo's book chapter on nanoscale robotics is published by Wiley. Congratulations!
July 2020Dr. Lakin's review article on domain-specific languages for molecular computing is published online in ACS Synthetic Biology.
July 2020Tracy Mallette's paper on L-DNA molecular logic gates is published online in ACS Synthetic Biology. Congratulations!
June 2020Dr. Lakin is appointed as an Assistant Professor (by courtesy) in the UNM Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering.
June 2020Dr. Lakin is Co-PI of a newly awarded grant: NSF grant 2031774: Engineered, Smart, Nucleic Acid-Binding, Intrinsically Disordered Proteins to Enable Ubiquitous Detection of Viral Pathogens and Diagnosis.
June 2020A new undergraduate student, Jacob McCullough, joins the group. Welcome!
May 2020Group member Chris Fetrow graduates from UNM with a B.S. degree in Chemistry with Honors, and with a minor in Physics. Congratulations!
February 2020A new graduate student, Kaitlin Eversole, joins the group. Welcome!
September 2019A new undergraduate student, Luis Paez, joins the group. Welcome!
August 2019A new graduate student, Randi Smith, joins the group. Welcome!
August 2019Dr. Lakin is awarded a new grant as Co-PI: NSF grant 1935087: Synthetic cells that can learn without evolution.
June 2019Dr. Lakin is awarded a pilot grant from the NM-INBRE project.
March 2019Dr. Lakin's paper on compartmentalizing molecular sensors in lipid vesicles is published online in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
December 2018Group member James Boney graduates from UNM with an M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering. Congratulations!
November 2018A new undergraduate student, Kelsie Herzer, joins the group. Welcome!
October 2018Dr. Lakin's paper with collaborators from Microsoft Research on modeling molecular systems using logic programming is published online in ACS Synthetic Biology.
September 2018Dr. Lakin's paper with the Lidke groups on super-resolution microscopy is published in PLOS ONE.
August 2018Dr. Lakin is awarded a new grant as Co-PI: NSF grant 1843958: Programmable control of metabolism in synthetic cells using intrinsically disordered proteins.
August 2018A new Ph.D. student, Sarika Kumar, joins the group. Welcome!
June 2018The journal version of Dr. Lakin's DNA23 paper is published online in Natural Computing.
June 2018Dr. Lakin is awarded a new grant as Co-PI: NSF grant 1763718: Biocompatible I/O interfaces for robust bioorthogonal molecular computing.
June 2018Dr. Lakin is awarded a new grant as sole PI: NSF grant 1814906: Models and design tools for tethered molecular circuits.
May 2018A new undergraduate student, Danielsen Moreno, joins the group for a summer project. Welcome!
May 2018A new Masters student, James Boney, joins the group. Welcome!
May 2018Former group member Julian Weisburd graduates from UNM with a B.S. degree in Computer Science. Congratulations!
January 2018A new postdoc, Peter Davenport, joins the group. Welcome!
January 2018A new Ph.D. student, Tracy Mallette, joins the group. Welcome!
September 2017Dr. Lakin gives a talk on constraint-based analysis of tethered molecular circuits at the DNA23 conference in Austin, TX.
August 2017A paper co-authored by Dr. Lakin on lipid bilayer-based molecular logic gates is published online in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
August 2017The Lakin Lab opens! Founding members of the team are David Arredondo (Ph.D. student), Chris Fetrow (undergraduate student) and Julian Weisburd (undergraduate student).