News from Around Campus

• CGSI Faculty member Josh Coon, Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry, was highlighted for his lab’s work in cancer.
• CGSI Affiliate Karthik Anantharaman was listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate for 2025.
• Celebrating CGSI Affiliate Jake Brunkard: This Year’s Outstanding Student Parent Support Award Recipient.
• Dr. Claudia Solis-Lemus, Professor of Plant Pathology and CGSI Affiliate, was profiled for her work illuminating the tree of life.
• Welcome to CGSI Faculty member Jason Peters and his lab for their relocation to CGSI space in the Genetics-Biotechnology building.
• Welcome to recently appointed CGSI Affiliates: Alexander Birbrair (Department of Dermatology), Dhananjay Bhaskar (Biomedical Engineering), Emile Gluck-Thaler (Plant Pathology), Yang Lu (Biomedical Engineering). 

Publication Highlights

• Collaborative work led by Andre Sousa and UW-Madison colleagues used single-cell genomics to understand defects in early brain development in Down syndrome.  Science. April 2026.
• Research including CGSI Affiliate Melissa Harrison developed Pico-C, a new method to profile three-dimensional genome structure during early Drosophila embryogenesis.  Nature Genetics.  March 2026.  
• A new tool from the Gluck-Thaler lab, PAQman, enables quality assessment of long-read genome sequence assemblies.  G3. April 2026. 
• The Anantharaman lab developed a new scoring method and accompanying database for analyzing viral sequences from metagenomic data.  Nature Communications.  April 2026. 
• CGSI Affiliate Abbas Rizvi and team used single-cell and single-molecule analysis to understand spatial transcriptomics and enhancer dynamics in the human spinal cord. Neuron. April 2026. 
• The Keleş lab in collaboration with CGSI members in the Bresnick lab develop a contrastive learning method to identify impactful biology in single-cell genomics data. Nature Communications. March 2026. 
• CGSI Affiliates John Yin and Shiv Muthupandiyan develop mathematical models of dynamic evolution of viruses and their defective interfering particles.  PLoS Comp Bio. May 2026. 
• Collaborative work from the Dinh and Xu labs used integrative multiomic profiling to identify chromatin determinants of breast cancer.  Translational Cancer Bio. May 2026. 

• CGSI member Josh Coon was awarded a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship. 
• CGSI member Chris Hittinger was honored with a Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award. 

• Hilldale awardees from CGSI labs: Collin Gehl (Pool lab), Abigail Wu (Ané Lab), Jiaqi Chen (Ge Lab), Jonathan Buscher (Landick Lab), Amelia Rancour (Lang lab), Jiangrong Qin (Li Lab), Samanyu Jadhav (Murtaza Lab), Jieying (Iris) Xu (Ong Lab) 
• Hilldale Sophomore awardees from CGSI labs: Ishpreet Dang (Gasch Lab), Olivia Jerabek (Sharp Lab)