December 2025: Congratulations Phoebe on being awarded a Quad Fellowship!
October 2025: Liza, Lucia, and Ciara attend the Rustbelt RNA Meeting in Ohio, Ciara and Liza presented posters of their latest work.
Viktoriya and Liza attend the Molecular Bioscience Retreat and Liza presents her work.
September 2025: Congratulations Liza and Madga on their pre-print being posted to BioRvix. We’re excited to share this work with the scientific community.
August 2025:
Welcome to the lab, Isabelle! Isabelle is a shared lab manager. We’re thrilled to have her joining our team. She’s taking over the blue bench.
Alumni update: Congratulations Destiny, on starting medical school at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine!
We had our annual lab retreat! This year, we spent the morning at the Field Museum before coming back to campus for an afternoon of presentations and discussions, including covering the goals for the year, a science communication challenge, and an ethics discussion on the responsible use of AI in research.
July 2025:
Welcome to the lab Viktoriya! Viktoriya is joining us as part of the incoming cohort for the University of Chicago Post-Bac Scholars Research Program in Cell, Developmental and Molecular Biology (CDMB). We’re pleased to have her join the group and taking over the red bench.
Keely heads off to graduate school at Yale!
June 2025 :
Welcome to the lab Lucia! Lucia joins the lab as research analyst. We’re so happy to have her. She’s taken over the black bench.
Keely re-joins us for the summer, welcome back for the summer, Keely!
Alex’s wraps up her year in the lab and will be heading to UT-Health-Houston to start graduate school this fall. She will be missed.
Congratulations to all our lab members (Charlie and Keely) and lab alumni (Ry) who graduated this spring and are heading to graduate school!
May 2025:
Cassandra attends the RNA Society meeting in San Diego. What a wonderful conference.
April 2025:
Cassandra received an award from the Mather’s Foundation in collaboration with Dr. Scott Oakes. See the BSD press release here!
Congratulations to lab alumni Ry on her NSF GRFP Award and Keely on her Honorable Mention. Also, a big congratulations to previous co-authors Tanae and Kevin on their Honorable Mentions.
Also, a huge congratulations to all our lab members and lab alumni headed off the graduate school in the fall.
Liza and Cassandra attend ASBMB in Chicago. Liza did an outstanding job presenting a poster!
The lab welcomes a qPCR Machine as part of shared equipment supported by the Neuroscience Institute.
February 2025:
Welcome to our two newest undergraduate researchers, Ciara and Phoebe! Cassandra gives a seminar at Purdue.
January 2025:
Welcome to the lab, rotation students Ashley (BMB) and Yeaji (Neuro)!
November 2024:
Alex attends ABRCMS in Pittsburg and Cassandra attends the International tRNA Conference in Kanazawa, Japan.
October 2024:
Cassandra and Dr.Phoebe Rice co-author a piece in the Education Corner of the PDB titled Paper Nucleic Acid Models for Hands-on Education, highlighting our work on developing outreach models that can be used in outreach or classroom settings. Read about it here.
Alex and Cassandra shared that outreach project again at the 2024 South Side Science Festival, with members of the Rice Lab.
Welcome to the lab to our Neurobiology grad program rotation student, Tracey!
Liza and Cassandra attend the RNA Rustbelt Meeting in Newark, Ohio and Liza presents a poster. It was a great meeting!
Liza and Alex present posters at the 2024 Molecular Biosciences Retreat, great job Alex and Liza!
September 2024:
Welcome to the lab, Fede, our fall Neurobiology grad program rotation student!
We had a great time presenting about DNA structure and protein translation at 2024 South Side Science Festival with our neighbors, the Rice Lab.
August 2024:
Cassandra speaks as part of the NIGMS/NIH MOSAIC Informational Webinar.
We’ve updated our lab values to reflect the values we collaborated to develop – check them out under Lab Values.
July 2024:
Welcome to the lab Maggie (technician) and UChicago PREP scholar Alexandra! We’re excited to have these two join the lab!
The lab has it’s second annual Hayne Lab Retreat! Topics included this year’s accomplishments and goals for the next year, everyone gave a short science talk, and we did a NIH ethics case study discussion. We also discussed lab community values and had plenty of time for team building.
June 2024:
Welcome to the lab, Keely! Keely is a visiting summer undergraduate from Boston College.
Huge congratulations to all three of our summer undergraduate researchers, Charlie, Danielle, and Keely on receiving fellowships to support them this summer in the lab! It’s going to be a busy and fun summer.
Magda wraps up her Bio-Lab internship and heads back to Poland to defend her thesis!
Cassandra attends the GRC:Post-transcriptional Gene Regulation and shares a poster on some of our newest work from Liza and Magda.
Summer 2024 Lab Photo
Summer 2024 White Sox Game
Lab Photo May 2024
May 2024:
Congratulations to Daniel as he heads off to a M.D./Ph.D. program!
Alumni update: Ry is the recipient of a 2024 Astronaut Scholarship!
April 2024:
Congratulations to Liza on advancing to Ph.D. candidacy!
Cassandra and Gabriel present at the 2024 CMND symposium, it’s always great to share our research! 🙂
Cassandra gives a talk at the Ohio State Center for RNA Biology. It was a a fantastic tRNA biology packed visit.
Congratulations to lab alum Ry on receiving a prestigious 2024 Beckman Scholarship!
Ry and Cassandra’s collaborative review of tRNA nucleases is in press at Trends In Genetics.
March 2024:
Cassandra gives an invited talk at the ASBMB Discover BMB Cryo-EM Interest Group. We can’t wait for Discover BMB in Chicago next Spring, see you there!
January 2024:
Congratulations Cassandra and Gabriel on receiving one of the inaugural Center for Motor Neuron Disease Trainer/Trainee Pilot Awards to support a new project!
Cassandra’s Postdoc NSMB paper on the structure of the human TSEN complex is recognized as an 2023 NIEHS Paper of the Year! Papers were selected from over 3400 grantees and researchers funded by NIEHS. Congratulations to all authors!
Welcome to the Lab, Alyssa and Maryam! Alyssa is a graduate student from the BMB program, rotating for the winter quarter. Maryam is an UChicago undergraduate.
November 2023:
Cassandra is featured in a spotlight article by the RNA Society.
October 2023:
We had a great time at the 2023 Rustbelt RNA Meeting at MSU, so much fantastic RNA science!
Fall 2023:
Welcome to the lab Charlie and Danielle! We’re excited to have these undergraduates join the lab.
September 2023:
The lab hosted an activity table at the South Side Science Festival. We shared a table with our neighbors, the Rice Lab, where we covered DNA, RNA, structure, and protein translation with hands on activities.
Cassandra gives a talk at the RNA Center at the University of Rochester.
September 2023 – The lab hosted an activity table at the South Side Science Festival with the Rice Lab. We loved sharing our enthusiasm for science and nucleic acids.
July 2023 – Summer Group Photo (Missing Liza)
August 2023:
Cassandra’s collaborative review on recent discoveries about the eukaryotic TSEN complex is in press at JBC, check it out HERE.
Our lab enjoyed our first lab retreat! Topics included accomplishments in 2023, our goals for the next year, a science communication challenge, a case study discussion, and some team building activities.
July 2023:
The lab did some hands-on DNA extractions (from strawberries) and micro-pipetting demonstrations with local high school students as part of the SMART Program.
Welcome to the lab, Magda! Magda joins the lab as part of the BioLab Program. Magda gives the purple bench its first full-time scientist.
June 2023:
Welcome to the lab, Destiny, Gabriel and Daniel! Destiny is joining us for the summer through the XULA BUILD program. Daniel is our lab’s new technician, and Gabriel is a postdoc.
May 2023:
Cassandra’s TSEN Structure Paper is published in NSMB and highlighted by a News & Views!
Liza joins as the lab’s first graduate student! Welcome Liza! Liza takes over the orange bench.
April 2023:
Cassandra is featured on the BSD website.
March 2023
Welcome to the lab, Liza! Liza is doing a graduate student rotation in the lab for the spring quarter.
Cassandra gives a talk as part of the RNA Biology Initiative at the University of Colorado – Anschutz.
February 2023
Welcome to the lab, Shreya! Shreya joins the lab as our first postdoctoral scholar.
January 2023
Welcome to the lab, Megan and Ry! Megan is our lab’s first graduate rotation student, doing a winter quarter rotation. Ry joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher.
December 2022
Cassandra joins the faculty in BMB and gets started setting up the lab.
Our R00 funding from NIGMS/NIH begins!
December 2022 – Lab setup underway with our rainbow colored benches – everyone gets a “main” color of stickers and paint pens to keep things organized, and so that lost pipettes and bottles are easily returned to their homes. (Photo inspired by a similar setup by Melody Campbell (Fred Hutch)).
The Hayne Lab 