April 24, 2023

Congratulations to Nishant for winning the 2023 CEBaM Catalyst Award!

April 19, 2023

Congratulations to Travis for the publication of his postdoctoral work in BMC Microbiology.

January 13, 2023

The team celebrated a new year with ice skating.

January 1, 2023

The Wright Lab achieved a new personal record for computer grid usage of 8 million hours in the past year. That's 913 years worth of computing – or the equivalent of 913 computers running all year long! Lots and lots of great work being done in the lab this past year.

December 9, 2022

Alli and Nishant made a snazzy video of the SubTap fabrication process. Check it out!

October 26, 2022

Congratulations to Ann, Caroline, Nithya, and Travis for their recently published research being highlighted in a Spotlight issue at the journal AEM.

October 8, 2022

It was a beautiful fall day for the lab's mushroom hunt in South Park in Pittsburgh.

September 1, 2022

Congratulations to the lab for a successful grant proposal to the EMSL at PNNL. The grant will provide support for mass spectrometry for two years.

July 29, 2022

Aidan and Erik presented at the Bioconductor 2022 conference in Seattle, WA. You can watch Aidan's presentation online here and Erik's presentation here.

July 19, 2022

Congratulations to Ann, Jennifer, and Sofia for their new paper about antibiotic synergy in PLOS Computational Biology! This paper was the result of a close collaboration between the Wright and Jamieson labs.

June 25, 2022

Congratulations to Aidan, Nishant, Sam, and Shu-Ting for great presentations at the Evolution conference in Cleveland.

June 16, 2022

The team had fun participating in CluedUpp by solving a mystery in downtown Pittsburgh.

May 2, 2022

Today the lab helped put on the CEBaM retreat. Everyone in the lab played a big role in making the 2022 retreat a huge success! We ran multiple group activities, concluding with evolutionary medicine trivia. It was wonderful to get the CEBaM community back together for the first time since the pandemic.

April 1, 2022

Happy 5th labiversary! This year's video has a movie trailer theme. Special thanks to Sofia for putting it together. We hope you enjoy the video!

December 14, 2021

We all had fun coloring our 3D printed Petri dish ornaments. Happy holidays from the Wright lab!

October 18, 2021

Congratulations to Jenny Jones for her new paper in eLife, which was highlighted in an Insights article! This paper was the result of a close collaboration between the Wright and Lakdawala labs.

October 16, 2021

Fresh off the presses, we just published our non-coding RNA gene caller in Bioinformatics. Congratulations to the lab for their eighth accepted publication this year!

September 18, 2021

We got together for roller skating. For a few team members it was their first time on skates. Everyone had an awesome time!

September 17, 2021

Congratulations to Nick for his new paper in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics. He shows the disadvantages of using similarity for protein classification and the benefits of using IDTAXA.

August 24, 2021

Congratulations to Caroline for her new paper in mSystems. She describes subtapping, a new technique for capturing coculture exometabolomes.

July 23, 2021

Congratulations to Andrew for his new paper in The Lancet Microbe where he describes the use of electronic health records to find combinations of antibiotics that evade resistance.

The research was covered in Infectious Disease News and Medical News Today.

June 26, 2021

The team got together at the Festival in the Park for activities, music, and fireworks!

May 22, 2021

The team had its first lab outing since the start of the pandemic. We played CluedUpp by solving a mystery in downtown Pittsburgh. It was a great day of fun!

April 1, 2021

Happy 4th labiversary! We themed our annual video this year off of the song Ten Duel Commandments from the popular Broadway musical Hamilton created by Lin-Manuel Miranda. We hope you enjoy the video!

March 19, 2021

Erik published a fun Ten Simple Rules piece in PLOS Computational Biology. It's about giving elevator pitches but with a baseball play on the word "pitch."

March 1, 2021

Congratulations to Nick for being nominated the David Swanson Awardee this year by the Open Science Grid (OSG)! Nick presented this week at the OSG All Hands Meeting.

December 22, 2020

Congratulations to Lauren Rost for her new publication, "Discordance among antibiotic prescription guidelines reflects a lack of clear best practices", in the journal OFID! Special thanks to our collaborators: M. Hong Nguyen, Neil Clancy, and Ryan Shields.

August 28, 2020

Congratulations to Andrew for his first successful DBMI Colloquium presentation over Zoom!

May 26, 2020

Erik's work on the evolution SARS-CoV-2 is featured in a MIDSTORY article.

April 1, 2020

The lab created this video during the COVID-19 quarantine to celebrate the third anniversary of the Wright lab. We themed it after the introduction to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood which was filmed in Pittsburgh. Special thanks to Andrew Beckley for video editing. We hope you enjoy the video.

February 3, 2020

Our first publication of 2020 was accepted in the journal RNA. In this study we developed a new benchmark, RNAconTest, for RNA multiple sequence alignment based on consistency among solved 3D structures. The results clarify the advantages and disadvantages of existing programs for comparative RNA analysis.

January 7, 2020

The lab received honorable mention in the holiday door decorating contest for best use of lab supplies. We had stockings made from autoclave bags (everyone received a 96 well plate), lights in test tubes and pipette tips, a wreath made from pipette tip boxes, chocolate in conical tubes (for the judges), and an electronic fire place!

November 21, 2019

Nick presented his latest work on orthology inference in two different seminar series on campus

October 4, 2019

Andrew presented his work on collateral sensitivity at IDWeek 2019.

September 18, 2019

Congratulations to Deepank for his new paper in Bioinformatics describing the first ever benchmark for gene finding. Deepank found that current gene finding programs are at least 5% inaccurate, mostly in their prediction of the correct start site.

June 26, 2019

Pitt Med Magazine covered our recent research on antibiotics in their latest issue.

June 24, 2019

Erik presented on the first steps toward antibiotic resistance at Evolution 2019.

June 12, 2019

Huge thanks to Ralph Crewe for inviting the lab to the Carnegie Science Center for a tour of the Buhl Planetarium. We were lucky to have perfect weather for star gazing from the rooftop telescope.

June 5, 2019

Congratulations to Caroline Birer for a well-attended presentation at ASMS in Atlanta, Georgia. Caroline presented her 3D printed platform for interrogating microbial strain interactions.

May 18, 2019

Congratulations to Caroline Birer for her publication in a special issue of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics about drug-drug interactions.

April 1, 2019

The lab put together a video to celebrate the second anniversary of the Wright Lab! Many thanks to Maria Bond for the video editing and the entire lab for contributing content. We hope you enjoy the video.

March 30, 2019

We celebrated the lab's second anniversary with mug decorating. This year we had a lot to celebrate, including our lab's first grant, first papers, and many new members. Here's to a great third year!

March 9, 2019

Congratulations to Caroline for her great presentation at the Pittsburgh Bacterial Meeting (Duquesne University). Caroline presented her work on decrypting the language of the microbiome using high-throughput mass spectrometry.

February 9, 2019

Today the lab volunteered at a food bank near Pittsburgh. We were put to work re-packing elbow macaroni, more pasta than any of us had ever seen. It was great fun for the whole team.

January 4, 2019

Erik presented the lab's work on "Piecing Together the Puzzle of Antibiotic Resistance through the Lens of Big Data" in the Senior Vice Chancellor's Seminar Series.

October 28, 2018

This weekend we took a tour of the Carrie Furnace and then carved pumpkins in preparation for Halloween. The lab has a surprising amount of pumpkin carving talent!

October 19, 2018

Erik presented our lab's work on the development of antibiotic resistance at Science2018 for the kick-off session of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM). We also had the opportunity to attend great talks by Bonnie Bassler (Princeton) and Paul Turner (Yale).

October 7, 2018

This week, Lauren attended the IDWeek conference in San Francisco, CA. A lot of people were interested in her poster about antibiotic stewardship guidelines.

October 19, 2018

Erik presented our lab's work on the development of antibiotic resistance at Science2018 for the kick-off session of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM). We also had the opportunity to attend great talks by Bonnie Bassler (Princeton) and Paul Turner (Yale).

October 7, 2018

This week, Lauren attended the IDWeek conference in San Francisco, CA. A lot of people were interested in her poster about antibiotic stewardship guidelines.

October 6, 2018

We enjoyed DOORS OPEN Pittsburgh so much last year that the lab decided to go again. This year we took at tour on classical architecture in downtown Pittsburgh.

October 3, 2018

Erik's work with David Baum on bacterial species concepts was published today in BMC Genomics.

October 2, 2018

Today it was announced that the lab won the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2)! See related announcements here, here, here, and here.

September 23, 2018

We enjoyed attending our local ecology and evolution conference, TREE. There were several great talks on the evolution of antibiotic resistance, including one by our very own Ann Donnelly.

September 16, 2018

The lab got together for a group hike on a beautiful fall day in Pittsburgh. We made it even more challenging by trying to locate chocolates that Erik had hidden all across the park. In the end we found them all and had a great time!

August 19, 2018

The team went to a baseball game today: Pittsburgh Pirates versus the Chicago Cubs. Pittsburgh won in the 11th inning with a home run!

August 10, 2018

Our work on microbiome classification was published today in the journal Microbiome. Congratulations to our lab's former undergraduate student, Adithya Murali, for his first publication!

August 1, 2018

We are pleased to announce that Andrew Beckley has joined the lab as our second PhD student. Andrew is coming to us from industry where he worked on the production-side of antibiotic development after performing antibiotics research as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester. In the Wright lab, Andrew will be working mining electronic health records to better understand the rise of antibiotic resistance in the clinic.

July 28, 2018

We had a great time attending BioC2018 in Toronto, Canada. Erik gave a talk on IDTAXA, Nick conducted a workshop on comparative genomics, and we even got to see Niagara Falls!

July 7, 2018

The team got together for a beautiful summer day in Pittsburgh to play some games.

July 2, 2018

We are excited to have Travis De Wolfe join our team! Travis recently completed a PhD in Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied the effects of probiotics on mitigating Clostridium difficile infection. In the Wright lab, Travis will be researching the role that spatial structuring plays in the microbiome.

August 1, 2018

We are pleased to announce that Andrew Beckley has joined the lab as our second PhD student. Andrew is coming to us from industry where he worked on the production-side of antibiotic development after performing antibiotics research as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester. In the Wright lab, Andrew will be working mining electronic health records to better understand the rise of antibiotic resistance in the clinic.

July 28, 2018

We had a great time attending BioC2018 in Toronto, Canada. Erik gave a talk on IDTAXA, Nick conducted a workshop on comparative genomics, and we even got to see Niagara Falls!

July 7, 2018

The team got together for a beautiful summer day in Pittsburgh to play some games.

July 2, 2018

We are excited to have Travis De Wolfe join our team! Travis recently completed a PhD in Food Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied the effects of probiotics on mitigating Clostridium difficile infection. In the Wright lab, Travis will be researching the role that spatial structuring plays in the microbiome.

June 11, 2018

We had a great time at ASM Microbe 2018 in Atlanta, GA. We learned a lot, Erik presented a poster, and we even got a chance to go on a team hike.

June 4, 2018

Congratulations to Nick for a great presentation at the NLM Informatics Training Conference in Tennessee.

April 20, 2018

We all had a great time getting to know other labs at the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine annual retreat. This year we did a series of interactive exercises culminating in each team developing an evolutionary medicine project.

April 1, 2018

The lab put together a video to celebrate the first anniversary of the Wright Lab! Many thanks to Maria Bond for the video editing and the entire lab for contributing content. We hope you enjoy the video.

March 23, 2018

The lab volunteered to judge contestants at the Pittsburgh Regional Science Fair. There were lots of really neat science projects done by local high school students.

March 21, 2018

For our first lab anniversary the team went out to dinner to celebrate. It was great getting everyone together, including future lab members who will be joining the team this summer!

March 2, 2018

Erik visits the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to present his work on gene flow among bacterial species at the Supercomputing and Life Sciences Symposium.

March 2, 2018

Erik visits the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to present his work on gene flow among bacterial species at the Supercomputing and Life Sciences Symposium.

February 1, 2018

We are excited to announce that Caroline Birer has joined our team! Caroline recently completed her PhD in natural products chemistry and molecular ecology at the University of French Guiana. In the Wright lab, Caroline will be working on understanding the language of intercellular communication among members of the microbiome.

January 26, 2018

Erik presented on his work on deriving the distribution of descendants at Florida State University's Ecology and Evolution Seminar.

January 12, 2018

Erik posted a new pre-print on bioRxiv about his work on using lineage barcoding to measure the distribution of descendants arising from individual bacteria.

November 19, 2017

This weekend we put our teamwork to use in breaking out of an escape room in Pittsburgh. The challenge was to figure out how to clone a fellow scientist. We broke the local record by completing the puzzle 20 minutes early (Nick got cloned!).

November 15, 2017

We are excited to announce that Lauren Rost has joined our team as the first PhD student! Lauren is part of the doctoral training program in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt. Her research involves mining electronic health records to learn about the impact of antibiotic resistance on the healthcare system (and vice-versa).

October 19, 2017

The Wright lab was recently featured in the Department's newsletter: Informatics Today. Check it out here.

August 20, 2017

We celebrated the end of summer with a lab hike in North Park. It was a great team building experience on a beautiful day.

August 20, 2017

We celebrated the end of summer with a lab hike in North Park. It was a great team building experience on a beautiful day.

August 9, 2017

Congratulations to Adithya for successfully completing his undergraduate research this summer. We are going to miss his cheerful presence in the lab!

August 5, 2017

Today the lab volunteered with Market Science Pittsburgh, a monthly science outreach event at the Bloomfield Farmer's Market. This month's theme was soil, which included examining soil under a microscope, looking at soil bacteria on a Petri dish, and performing a reaction with H2O2.

June 3, 2017

Big welcome to Nick Cooley, who has just joined the lab as the first postdoc! Nick completed his PhD at the University of Missouri working on the design of small molecule fluorescent sensors in the lab of Dr. Timothy Glass. Nick's interdisciplinary background is going to be a great asset as he begins working on natural product biosynthesis.

May 30, 2017

We are very excited to have Ann Donnelly joining us! Ann did her PhD work at Princeton on the development and characterization of artificial proteins. She will be involved in many of the lab's projects, but her primary focus is understanding the evolution of compensatory mutations in antibiotic resistant microorganisms.

May 22, 2017

Welcome to our newest lab member, Deepank Korandla! Deepank is an MS student at CMU who will be working on the problem of gene calling: given a genome, find the genes.

May 17, 2017

Adithya and Erik present their work on taxonomic identification for marker gene sequences at the GLBIO17 conference in Chicago.

April 6, 2017

Erik describes his transition to "soggy" lab research from engineering in an article in Science.

April 4, 2017

Filling of the new lab is underway at Bridgeside Point II. Here's a look at how we started before anything arrived:

The entrance into the Wright Lab.

Empty lab space!

Biosafety cabinet and incubators.

Front of the building (arrow points to the lab).

View of the opposite side of the river from the common area.

January 19, 2017

UW News: Erik shares his tools for discovery while at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.