Welcome to The UMass Metabolic Network

The MetNet Immunometabolism Symposium speakers were asked to provide two truths and a lie about themselves. Can you identify the lies? The person who gets the most correct answers will win a UMass MetNet T-shirt. Good Luck!

We will kick off 2023 with an Immunometabolism Symposium on Thursday, January 26 at 1:00 PM in the Sherman Center Auditorium.  It will explore the world of immune cell metabolism and feature research taking place at UMass Chan Medical School.  A Keynote lecture by Dr. Lydia Lynch from Harvard Medical School will be followed by short talks from UMass Chan scientists and Agilent.  This blog post will introduce you to the speakers.

Marcia Haigis studies the role of mitochondrial metabolism in aging and disease at Harvard Medical School. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to do postdoctoral research at MIT in Leonard Guarente’s lab. Marcia will be our guest speaker December 15th as MetNet spends the month featuring mitochondrial biology.

Lawrence Kazak studies mechanisms of mitochondrial energetics in adipocytes and cancer cells at McGill University in Montreal.  He obtained his BA and MSc at York University in Toronto before completing his PhD studies in the Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge in England. His post-doctoral studies were at Harvard Medical School with Bruce Spiegelman, where he developed his current research program around thermogenic adipocytes.  We asked Lawrence to answer some science and non-science related questions. 

We asked the four researchers who will be speaking at our upcoming Nutrient Sensing Symposium to provide two truths and a lie about themselves. Can you identify the false statements? The person with the most correct guesses will win a MetNet t-shirt.

Our first “Fluxing Star” speaker is a postdoc in the Edward Chouchani lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.  Haopeng Xiao conducted his PhD studies at Georgia Institute of Technology where he developed and utilized novel mass spectrometry technologies for studying protein posttranslational modifications. He has developed a method to comprehensively map the mouse cysteine redox proteome in vivo during aging and established a network analysis approach that leverages genetic variations in outbred populations to define regulators of metabolic physiology. We asked Haopeng to answer random science and non-science questions.

Thursday, November 10th the MetNet will feature four UMass Chan researchers during a Nutrient Sensing Symposium taking us on a journey through mechanisms of nutrient sensing beginning at the level of individual proteins (Dr. Kuang Shen), through organelle nutrient sensing (Dr. Jessica Spinelli) to cellular nutrient sensing (Dr. Read Pukilla-Worley) and concluding with organism level sensing (Dr. Jin Zhang). Each will speak for 20 minutes. 

The Metabolog is the new official blog of the UMass Metabolic Network. This first blog post looks back at our five year history and the future goals of MetNet. Welcome!

The first MetNet speaker of the 2022-23 academic year is Richard Possemato, Associate Professor at New York University Langone Medical Center. He conducted his PhD studies on the process of cellular transformation with Dr. William Hahn at Harvard. His postdoctoral research was at Whitehead Institute with David Sabatini, where he developed genetic and continuous flow cell culture tools for studying cancer metabolism. Richard’s lab studies various aspects of cancer metabolism including mitochondrial iron sulfur cluster and serin metabolism. We asked Rich to answer random science and non-science related questions.