Don’t miss the eagerly-anticipated Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture in the Opening Session of the 62nd Annual Drosophila Research Conference! The Larry Sandler Memorial Lecture is presented by an outstanding recent PhD graduate on the opening night of the Conference. This year, the Larry Sandler Awardee is Ching-Ho Chang, who will present the following lecture based on his research in Amanda Larracuente’s lab:
“Why are chromosomes so different? Genetic conflicts and genome evolution”
Congratulations also to this year’s Larry Sandler Award runners up:
- Kristina Stapornwongkul (Advisor: Jean-Paul Vincent)
- J. Dylan Shropshire (Advisor: Seth Bordenstein)
- Jiefu Li (Advisor: Liqun Luo)
About the awardees:
Ching-Ho Chang was born in Taiwan. He went to the National Taiwan University and graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Life Science. He received his Master’s degree from the Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at the National Taiwan University in 2011 under the mentorship of Dr. Chau-Ti Ting, studying the evolution of neo-sex chromosomes in Drosophila albomicans using genetics and computational biology. He continued his interest in chromosome evolution during his Ph.D. work by combining genetics, computational biology, and cytology to study the evolution of Drosophila centromeres, Y chromosomes, and meiotic drive under the guidance of Dr. Amanda Larracuente at the University of Rochester. As a graduate student, he held the Ernst Caspari and Messersmith Fellowships from the University of Rochester and a Government Scholarship to Study Abroad from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan. He earned his doctoral degree in Biology from the University of Rochester in 2020. Dr. Chang is currently a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Harmit Malik at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center, studying the function and evolution of sperm chromatin using Drosophila.
Kristina Stapornwongkul did her Masters at the University of Heidelberg and then moved to London to do a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD in Jean-Paul Vincent’s lab at the Crick Institute. Since February, she is a postdoctoral fellow at EMBL Barcelona.
Dylan Shropshire received his PhD from the Bordenstein lab at Vanderbilt University and is currently an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in Brandon Cooper’s lab at the University of Montana.
Jiefu Li did his Ph.D. thesis research with Prof. Liqun Luo at Stanford University. He developed proteomic and genetic tools to study cell-surface signaling in the precise assembly of Drosophila olfactory circuits.
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