Zefan (Vivien) Li, a third-year graduate student in the Jin lab, has been selected for the 2026 cohort of Washington University in St. Louis’s Pivot 314 Fellowship, a competitive program that supports emerging leaders across disciplines.
Aki Ushiki, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been awarded a 2026 Peter J. Pappas Research Grant from the Preeclampsia Foundation. The award provides $99,997 in research funding to support innovative studies aimed at improving outcomes for pregnant individuals and babies affected by preeclampsia and related hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
A collaborative research effort between the laboratories of Qingyun Li, PhD, assistant professor in the Departments of Genetics and Neuroscience, and Harrison Gabel, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine has uncovered fundamental mechanisms that govern how microglia—the brain’s resident immune cells—adapt their functional states across development, aging, and disease. The study, “State-specific enhancer landscapes govern microglial plasticity,” was recently published in Immunity.
The Department of Genetics is proud to announce that Yang Li, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Neurosurgery, has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) ‘A’ Award Grant for his groundbreaking work in childhood cancer research. The award provides $800,000 in total funding over four years, supporting Dr. Li’s efforts to advance understanding of aggressive pediatric brain tumors.
Jeff Milbrandt, MD, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Professor of Genetics and executive director of the McDonnell Genome Institute, and Aaron DiAntonio, MD, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Developmental Biology, received the Dean’s Medal for Innovation and Commercialization for their high-caliber scientific research and commercialization achievements.
Graduate student Kia Barclay of the Li Lab has been selected as a Graduate Student Recipient of the 2025 Provost’s Research Excellence Award, a prestigious university-wide honor recognizing outstanding research achievement. Barclay is one of only seven students across both the Danforth and Medical campuses to receive the award this year—and the sole honoree representing the School of Medicine, underscoring the exceptional impact of her scientific contributions.
The Long Life Family Study project, led by Michael Province, PhD, was recently renewed by the National Institute on Aging for $80 Million dollars over 5 years (2U19AG063893-06), to perform sequencing effort as well as recruit new families. PacBio and LLFS expect to begin sequencing in Q4 2025 at the McDonnell Genome Institute at WashU Medicine, with an initial tranche of ~5,500 samples, and the full ~7,800- sample program spanning five years.
Meers and his team are developing a novel time-lapse profiling method to monitor changes in how a cell’s genes are regulated as it goes through the reprogramming process. A better understanding of these changes could lead to the development of more precise and efficient cell conversion methods that are more suitable for human therapeutics.
The newly launched Department of Genetics fellow-to-faculty program aims to prepare fellows not just as scientists but as future leaders. The first recruit, Macias-Velasco, earned his PhD at WashU in computational and systems biology, a field that uses sophisticated statistical approaches to understand human genetics and the development of disease.
The Department of Genetics recently hosted the 2nd Gary D. Stormo Computational & Systems Biology Lecture, featuring keynote speaker Timothy Hughes, PhD, who presented his talk, “Codebook: sequence specificity of human transcription factors.” As part of the event, the department proudly announced this year’s Stormo Fellowship in Computational and Systems Biology recipient: Jennie Yao, a PhD student in the labs of Dr. Obi Griffith and Dr. Malachi Griffith.